If you’re sure you already know what you want, hire a college student web designer, spend a year getting it wrong a few times. Clear your head, then come in with a more realistic idea of what will work for your firm. Hey, it wont be cheaper, but at least you’ll know why.
Buy your domain name
You can read a lot online about choosing a business name, but nowadays, it’s basically worthless to start a business without already having a good domain. Depending on the type of business it is, you may need a domain that looks better viewed, while other businesses would do better to have it sound better.
Obviously go for both where possible. And keep it under 8 letters if possible.
Forget web design
Save yourself and your potential firm a lot of time by looking through templates. A designer should have content to work with or they’re just guessing; those guesses are time you’re paying for and will lead to more frustration and disappointment than necessary. Information design, however, involves piecing together your ideas into a coherent map of everything you’ve got. It also shines a light on what you don’t have, which means you’re getting somewhere, finally.
That said… well-defined interface and attention to intricate design details make people want to work with you, like being good-looking.
Forget company page, bios
These are content pages that will be revised a hundred times and can likely be developed concurrently with the last 2-3 steps of the process. Your current website may be minimally useful; this is especially true if you had a site built more than two years ago. concepts and technologies change, your business goals don’t.
Focus on inventory
Whether you have a product or service, you need to define what comprises a product detail page. These pages are the heart and soul of conversions; you need to develop a detail page that sells to visitors. Knowing what the visitor expects and giving it to them shows competency and builds credibility. These product pages may also be the entry pages to your website if you’re getting good exposure, so build them as such. “Home pages” are less important than they were.
User centric architecture
What will you ultimately expect of an engagement. If a visitor finds your site, you need to be able to track the source of the campaign and its effectiveness based on conversion tracking so you can save money/time on useless advertising. Knowing how they react to your site architecture means you can constantly analyze for better pathways.
Process
Gather information on systems you have currently in place so you put the integration requirement on the table up front. Be aware of the most time-consuming of your manual processes so you can prioritize finding ways to automate these processes.
Choosing a vendor
You need to know how the interactive vendor works to know if it will fit with your goals. Being able to count on this process means less emotional decisions. Try to assess how this process has previously been implemented is various scenarios.
- How do they accept content, revisions, feedback?
- Are there intermediary milestones at which you can evaluate progress? Are there provisions for opting out based on these milestones?
- Do they just do what you ask for, or do they craft directed experiences to engage visitors.
This is ultimately the most clear difference between development firms. - Who are the people involved and how do they intend to interact daily, weekly
- Is there collaborative project management software (like Basecamp) in place to share information?
- What does a sample contract look like?
Technology
Make sure the vendor complies with industry-standard best practices, such as W3C code specifications. The front-end code of a website is critical because if you adhere to the structure and semantically lay out the content on the page, the search engines will have an easier time indexing your site. The real success of a website comes from organic (natural) search ranking.
It may not work the same for everyone, but using a platform or framework for development, such as Rails or Drupal, significantly reduces the time spent developing the basic elements of a site such as user authentication and content modelling. Some companies still use proprietary or home-grown programming for all of their projects, which can work well, but frameworks are continually being refined and therefore have a focused effort on maturation of code and concepts. A thousand developers with something to prove can usually produce techniques that a small shop just can’t.
Try to get an idea of the content management system you’ll be using. It may not be exactly the same one as you’ll be using, but you will likely get a sense of the quality.