Your Website

Overview
The Project Brief
Talking to your Designer
Hosting
Traffic

It is expected by most customers that businesses they deal with will have a website. It’s a quick point of reference for customers who are comparison shopping, even when your products/services are not sold from your site. It’s your other "director of first impressions" (your receptionist being the original.)

A website and its upkeep should be included in your ongoing marketing expenses. Expect to pay at least $2,200 for a professionally-designed site with around 15 pages. Extra features, pages, multimedia and a storefront can push a small business project out to $22,000.

But how do you choose a web designer?

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The Project Brief

First, create a brief for your website project. Answer these questions in a document which will form the basis of your future discussions with designers:

Are you starting from scratch or updating your existing site?
Make a list of 5-10 sites you like and the reasons why.
Make a list of 5-10 sites you dislike and the reasons why.
Make a list of 5-10 competitor sites and your comments.
What is the purpose of your site? Create a mission statement for it.
What type of visitors do you want to attract?
How will you measure the success of the site? More sales? More enquiries?
What is your budget?
When do you need the site completed?
How do you plan to update the site?
Are there any products/services involved?
Do you plan to sell things from the site or showcase them?
Is the site required to have any interactive components (where visitors can affect the content)?
Are there corporate colours/images that are to be used? If so, what are they?
Do you have a slogan?
Can you create a draft/basic site map as you imagine it will be? Illustrate this with a flowchart starting at the top with the Home page.
List up to 10 phrases people will use to find your site using a search engine

The best way to choose a web designer is to find out who created the sites you like the most. Also, ask around - your colleagues will have recommendations for you.

You can actually pitch your job to designers around the world using sites such as www.elance.com and www.rentacoder.com. They’ll bid for your project and you choose the best match.

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Talking to your Designer

Questions for potential web designers:

How do you charge? Flat fee or hourly rate? It is best to agree upon a flat fee for the project, with a detailed specification of work to be completed. It is likely the designer will need to add an hourly rate to cover any requests/changes outside the specification, so check that rate. Expect to pay around $99/hour. Check the extra fees are charged in small chunks (ie no more than 15 minutes).
Ask your designer what website services they offer. Some will offer hosting, newsletter features, search engine optimisation, a do-it-yourself site editing tool and templates for your products and services.
Ask for links to sites your designer has completed and check with a handful of those sites. Call/email the owners and ask if they mind giving you a few words about the designer.
Ask how the designer/design house prioritises jobs. Do they allocate one designer to one project, or is each designer working on a number of projects. Ask how realistic they can be with estimated completion dates.
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Hosting

Once your site has been created, you need to store it somewhere that’s quickly and easily accessed by anyone typing in your domain name. Unless you have your own corporate network with computers that are likely to be online and functioning 24 hours a day (and your own network specialist), you'll need to choose a web host to store your files on their computers called servers.

Ask your web designer for advice and recommendations.

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Traffic

Each time a visitor comes to your website, they are downloading a copy of the pages to their own computer via their Internet connection. That includes all the text and graphics too. This transfer of information is known as traffic (also known as bandwidth or data transfer).

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