Be decisive and clear about what you need. All communication is billable time. Organize how you want your material to be layed out. Deliver all your materials as soon and as complete as possible.

Have your artwork prepared and in good condition otherwise it could take considerable time to repair or edit artwork. Find a good photographer. Supply high resolution artwork. 300dpi is best. Files ending in JPG, TIFF, GIF, PDF are commonly acceptable.

A final draft of text or edits composed by you works best. For extensive changes in your text, it's best for you to recompose all your text. Files ending in DOC, DOCX, TXT or RTF are acceptable. It's best not to compose your changes in an email because then I will have to convert it into usuable form. Send text in attachments.

Answer all questions I ask in a timely manner and your changes will happen ASAP. I will halt a project until I get answers. I want to save you time and money by not doubling back over guessed answers.

Make phone calls to your hosting company to get passwords and server access configurations. From experience, this could take up to an hour and a half to resolve with some companies. If I call your provider and I'm put on hold, you are paying for my time.

Too many opinions about changes from all your friends will add lots of time to the project. Have the smallest committee decide with you. There are many ideas out there about what looks good or is effective. Remember that I bill for all samples.

If you are a designer or artist at heart, you may want the site elements tweaked again and again and this adds time to the project. Avoid this by creating the artwork yourself and finding web colors from my color swatches below. Or, just take a leap of faith and let me design the page. Every tweak is billed. Creating online is not the same as a print job, interior decoration or clothing design. Commit a design now and you can always redesign a look later.

If you like getting it done now, going from point A to point B, you will stay within budget. If you like to go from point A to point T to point G to point X and then back to A, consider every turn an increase in costs. I have seen indecision double or quadruple in cost, but that may not be a bad thing if you really want to get it right!

Show me examples . Draw on paper how you want elements to be organized. If you ask me to put a picture or text anywhere I like on the page and then come back and tell me to move something again and again, you will be billed again and again. Make your decisions on paper first.

If you tell me to go for it and be creative and then tell me later that what I produced was not the creativity you were looking for, this can be frustrating for both of us and you will be billed regardless. I cannot read minds. It's best for you to show me online examples and then I can customize and modify the look you liked. Do you really want me to go for it? If so - great!

Your browser settings and plugins can also affect how you view your pages. If java is disabled, many page characteristics could be adversely affected.

Your monitor color, brightness, contrast settings can dramatically affect the colors you want to see. LCD and laptop monitors generally have low quality output. If your monitor has a contrast ratio of at least 700:1, you should generally be okay.

Your screen resolution can affect how big or how small your website appears. If you have a large monitor at home and want your site to fill it from edge to edge, then when viewed on a laptop, you will have to scroll vertically and horizontally a lot to see the whole page on a smaller monitor.

A huge mistake: Having your site designed so that you can enjoy it on YOUR possibly poor or cheap monitor. I suggest viewing the site on different monitors and you will see what I mean. If you have a cheap monitor, settings that are wrong, the site could look terrible for you and beautiful for everyone else. For example: A client was wondering why their site had a green background and that it looked all washed out. The site actually had a crisp white background and vivid colors. The color settings on their ancient monitor was failing like and old TV. Another client could only see white instead of shades of gray in their designs. Their monitor was set very bright which washed out details. Again, try viewing your site on other monitors. Try upgrading your browser.