You must know the purpose that your website is supposed to serve.
There are many reasons to build a website for your business. In order to cut down on cost and time, it's important to know what you'd like that purpose to be before you start. Is it sales, visibility, credibility, or what? For example, during website construction for an informational site, do you know what categories you want to have? If it's a commerce site, do you know what you'd like to sell and are you prepared for delivery? If you're developing a site for advertising purposes, do you have a general message or mood that you'd like to get across?

This is the most important step. It'll keep you on track and it'll make sure that you get a successful finished product.

We’ve found that when most people are creating their first website, they often want to do it themselves. This is absolutely possible. However, it isn't necessarily always the best idea. A good web designer has built a myriad of sites, so they know what will and will not work. For example, we've dealt with many different clients. Some people come to us with concepts that just wouldn't work. As an individual or small business you've got great ideas, but a web designer will translate your idea into something that will work well on the Internet to achieve desired results.

First and foremost, your web designer is a graphic designer. They know how to take your idea and turn it into something aesthetically pleasing. So often, we've heard clients say, "I'm not really that worried about the graphic element of my site", more often than not this lack of graphic sophistication is what makes a web site unsuccessful. There are lots of sites on the web that have great content, but the ones that get the most traffic present it in a great looking package.


What should I expect a web designer to deliver?
Simply put, a web designer will give you a well designed website. Very often, you will either be given a CD (or have it uploaded to your service provider) containing all of the pages in your website.

People are so anxious to start building their website, that they often forget that they need real content. A web designer should sit down with you, and build a site map. This site map shows the pages of the site, and how they connect to each other. If a web designer has all the content provided to them, then it can be build into the base design of the site as soon as the design stage starts. Otherwise it will have to be built in as an after thought. This is problematic for so many reasons. First, it takes extra time to build the site. If you stop the design process in order to create your content, your web designer may take on other clients, which means that there is less time to devote to your project. Second, your project will cost considerably more if the content isn’t delivered at the start.

Think of hosting as a rental home for your website. You rent this space by the month, and each provider provides you and your site with a variety of services. At this point you should decide what's important to you in a server for your site. Do you need some place to sell a product? Do you need specialized e-mail addresses? How much space is your website going to require? Etc.

There are different hosting companies and each of them offers different packages. We suggest that you investigate these carefully before choosing a package that's right for you.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are designed to help the public find your site. This asks the question of "How do I get my site to rank on these search engines?" There are many different techniques that are employed to rank your site with search engines. Certain web design packages will include basic search engine ranking when others will not. There are also companies which only do search engine optimization. If this is a service that you're interested in, be sure to investigate search engine optimization when you start building your site. (For more information go to www.newmedia.org.)

There are many ways to keep your site updated. It depends what you'd like to update. Most web designers will perform updates for a reasonable hourly rate. If you'd prefer to do it yourself, it depends on how your site is built. Some sites have interfaces to perform updates without delving into the code itself, while others do not. Obviously the DIYers will prefer the former interface. Another factor would be what kind of updates you are trying to perform. To change images, you'll most likely need some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop. To make changes to the internals of your site, you may need certain fluencies in either CSS or HTML. As with most things, it depends upon the construction of your site. However, rest assured there is always a solution.


Intensive forethought saves time and money while setting the stage for top results. Think, investigate, and organize before you plow ahead.