Creating your web site can be a tricky process. Choosing the best web design company for your site is extremely important. Unless you run a web-based business, you probably do not have web design experience within your company. Building your web site will take time and a little homework!

To create a web site for your business, follow these 4 simple steps:

1. Establish your goals
2. Determine your budget
3. Pick a web design company
4. Pick a web hosting company

Establish Your Goals

Before you begin looking for company to help you design and build your web site, take the time to understand the goals of your web site. This will be extremely important to help set expectations with the web design company you choose.

In order to set your web site goals, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want a web site?
• Are you selling something?
• Do you have a catalog of products that changes on a regular basis?
• Who is your target market?
• Do you already have a brand?
• What is your industry?
• Who are your competitors?
• Do they already have web sites? If so, what do they look like?
• If you’re selling something, will you accept credit cards over the internet?
• How soon do you want your web site?
• What happens if you never create a web site for your business?

Take the time to answer each of the above questions and if you have time, write the answers down on a sheet of paper. These are the same questions most web design companies will ask you before they begin to create your site. If you have these questions answered up front, you will have some criteria for choosing the right web design company. For example, if you are a real estate agent, and want to publish listings on your web site, you should seek a web design company that knows about the real estate business and has created web pages for other real estate agents.

Determine Your Budget

How much do you want to spend on your web site. Web sites can cost you anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending upon what you want it to do. Know your spending constraints before you begin negotiating with design companies. Whatever you do, do not tell a web design company what your budget is!! Always get pricing based on your needs, not you budget.

Pick a Web Design Company

Your choice of a web design company is a very important step. Take your time to investigate all of your options. Here are some important items to consider.

Design vs. Build

Depending upon the scope of your web site, you may need to choose two different companies. Building a web site is a highly technical process. Designing a web site is a highly creative process. Many advertising firms specialize in web site design which does not necessarily require any web development skills whatsoever. The process of creating a web site is similar to the process of building a new home. Before you ask a construction company to start building, you first seek out an architect who creates a blueprint of your house taking into account what you want (number of stories, square footage, etc.). Creating a detailed blueprint before construction begins can help you accurately estimate the final price. Without the blueprint, you may end up paying a lot of money for a house that does not fit your needs. Creating a web site is exactly the same except most web site “builders” also claim to be “designers”. The good news is that you can look at other sites a web design company has created (like looking at other homes that a home builder has made). Make sure you ask the web design company what their process is for designing a web site vs. building a web site. They should understand the difference between these two concepts. If they don’t, they’re probably builder that think they can also architect.

Evaluate Experience

Has the web design company created web sites similar to yours? Do they have relevant industry experience? As with any services company, choosing someone that has relevant experience. If you want to sell products through your web site and accept credit card payments, does the web design company you are considering have experience doing just that?

Review the Portfolio

A well established web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site the design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do the sites have a style that appeals to you? In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. Contact their clients and ask them about their experience with the web design company. Were they happy with the results? Did they get what they paid for? How much did they pay? Would they recommend them? How long did it take? What didn’t they like about the company? How responsive was the company when they had questions?

Compare Prices

Pricing for creating a web site can vary. Typically, web design companies will charge one of three ways:

• Time and materials: price is variable based on the actual number of hours spent working on your site. For example, a web design company may charge you $75 per hour. If it takes 100 hours to create your web site, your price would end up being $7,500.
• Fixed Price: some design companies will charge you a fixed fee based on a fixed set of requirements. If you outline your requirements very carefully, many web design companies will quote you a single price.
• Component Pricing: some design companies will charge “by the page”. By creating a price based on the number of pages, you can control the cost by designing a specific number of pages. Buyer beware: some design companies will charge by the page but will have “special pricing” for components such as custom graphics, animated images, and the like.

The most important step in pricing is to make sure the potential design company outline all of the prices associated with the work and puts it all in writing. Never enter into a deal unless all of the costs are well understood up front. Also make sure that you understand what “done” means. Try and structure the payments such that a significant portion of the fees (20%) are not due until you “accept” the final web site. Include the agreed-upon dates in your contract and provisions for what will happen if these dates are not met.

Solicit bids from multiple web design companies and compare both the pricing models and the prices themselves.

There are thousands of web designers across the country and they should all fight feverously for your business! Be picky! If a web design company dismisses any of your questions regarding their design process, pricing, or client references, take your business elsewhere!

Let’s start with the basics. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is all about choosing and utilizing the best methods to make sure that your site gets the traffic it deserves. You will also be happy to learn that SEO is all about “unpaid” search results. It can apply to different types of searches including video searches, local searches and images searches.

One of the ways that search engines make a decision as to whether or not your website is important or relevant is by the text on each page of the website. You could have the coolest, snazzier website around, but if it only had only images, no text, and no other websites linked to it, Google would be highly unlikely to think that your site deserved to be noticed.

Onsite vs Offsite SEO

Onsite SEO is when you boost your website traffic by making changes to web content including static pages, blogs, and meta keywords, and descriptions. Make sure that you don’t skip using a strong title tag and, if possible, choose URLs that contain SEO elements as well.

When it comes to Onsite SEO, it takes is some knowledge of how to find the best keywords that apply to your website and also how to properly integrate them. Once you have keywords working on your site’s behalf, you can constantly receive traffic from search engines and you can potentially forgo other methods like taking out web ads such as Google ad words (Pay Per Click) to receive that traffic.

However, there is also a whole other world for how you can generate traffic from other websites and that is called offsite SEO. One of the benefits of Offsite SEO is that it can help a great deal, and this is particularly true if your website is new. This type of search engine optimization shows the search engines that your website is relevant enough that other sites are referencing it.

A popular method of getting offsite SEO is to do link exchanges with other sites. Another popular way of generating traffic to your site is to publish articles and/or press releases on third party sites. When these articles link back to your site, it assists with your Offsite SEO optimization. If you have an RSS feed, you should also submit it to blog directories and search engines.

Your Potential Customers are Searching the Web

When people who are looking for your company’s products or services try to find them, of course, they use search engines. Each year the number of online sales as opposed to offline sales grow. The way people find these results is pretty obvious at this point, unless, of course, you have been living on a remote island. Potential customers “Google” to find the results they are looking for.

Obviously, you want your business to start showing up in these online searches. When your site appears frequently, you will get better results. If you aren’t getting good placement on Google, you can virtually bet that one of your competitors are… and that means they could be getting your traffic!