Effective web design and colocation for fast, reliable access at lower costs

Article by: Nigel Winterburn, 7th March 2010

For large enterprises, using an outside company that specialises in high-impact, refined website designs is worth looking into as the site is the public face of the company and the impression that it makes on potential clients and business partners can have a major effect on revenue streams and help to raise brand awareness. Smaller firms can also benefit from professional design services, for similar reasons. Rather than hosting their website on their own premises, many organisations are now looking at using third party facilities to free up their own IT resources for internal use. There are various other benefits to letting someone else take care of the servers and environment in which they are placed as well. Costs can be reduced as large data centres can be shared. Latency can be reduced for customer access to your website meaning that it will load more quickly, which is always a desirable feature, no matter how simple or complicated the design of the site is.

A well-designed site should however take the bandwidth that people using the internet have available to them as this will affect the loading times of flash animations and other such media files. It is quite possible to create a modern-looking website with clear menus providing simple, easy-to-use navigation without resorting to graphical presentations that take too long to load and drive traffic away as a result. Colocation allows your company to concentrate its efforts on what it does best and let someone else worry about coping with high levels of traffic to the website. Other firms use such services as part of their back-up strategy, either for critical data or as redundant servers that can be switched to in the event of a hardware failure affecting their own internet servers. The best design in the world is no good if there is a significant amount of downtime. Nothing puts prospective customers off more than websites that are unavailable for any length of time. A good design company should also work closely with their clients to ensure that what they come up with is in keeping with the corporate image as a whole.

This means that several different departments are usually involved in the design process, from the client company's side of things. Once all parties are satisfied with the end result, the hosting options can be looked at in detail. If it is decided that having it all dealt with by an outside company is the best way to go then the next thing to do is decide who offers the best agreements at the most competitive rates. Colocation services are becoming increasingly popular so the choice of providers is growing all the time. Many website design companies offer hosting facilities too but for large scale operations a firm that owns or has access to state-of-the-art data centres is probably a better option as they are more used to dealing with high volumes of traffic and clients that demand the very best in hardware and services.