Starting a web design firm at a young age is a rewarding experience. I can still remember when Saint John Web Design, Informative Computer Solutions, begun. I was on messenger talking to my friend, and later partner,Zack Spear who was proposed by one of our high school friends to make him a website for his real estate business. At that time we did not even know there were "standards" for web designs, we barely knew what CSS was. Regardless we tackled the project and were quite impressed with what we had accomplished. Once we finished that project and collected our pay we decided to start our own web design firm.In this article I will talk about some of the steps involved with starting your own web design company.

One of the first steps is to come up with a name and brand. We took about a week before we could come up with a name for our company. We decided on Informative Computer Solutions or ICS for short. We decided this name based on our university years and our major in Information and Communication Studies. Your next step in conjunction with picking your brand is to get a domain name. We actually did both at the same time.

TIP: You may want to check if there is a domain available for your company name before writing it in stone.

Our next step was designing a logo. Im not quite sure how we came up with our logo but we believed it was different from other design firms in the city and we also thought that it was fresh and nice to look at. If you are having troubles designing your own logo, don't feel bad if you have to outsource it. Theres plenty of people willing to design on for you, ourselves especially!

TIP:You do not want a logo you are going to get sick of looking at

Your next step should be in choosing a web hosting company to deal with. Our company choose godaddy.com for both our domain and hosting purchases. Invest in a deluxe, unlimited hosting package and pay based on years. This will save you money. Once you have a hosting package you can know sell your unlimited hosting space to your clients for a partial price of what they would pay. This is a win-win situation for you and the client.

TIP:reselling hosting is a good add on sale in conjunction with building a client a web site.

Your next big step is to design and build your own website.I have seen good and bad web designers websites. Some are very cheesy and some are rather plan and boring. You will want something that stands out at the same time represents a professional front for your company. You basically want something that offers the client confidence in your skills. I would stay away from outsourcing your website to another design firm because if you cannot build your own site you should not be in this field.

Once your site is done you will need to do some basic Search Engine Optimization. I wont bore you on this topic as there is a fruitful cornucopia available on the internet. The main things you need to do are submit your site to all the major search engines, and directories. The big ones include: Google, yahoo, dmoz, and bing.

This is all for the first part of this article. In Part Two I will be discussing some skills and design tactics a web design firm should develop.

Mike Capson is the Chief Operating Officer and part owner, founder of Saint John Web Design : Informative Computer Solutions . He studied Information and Communication Studies at the University of New Brunswick.