Posts Tagged ‘building a website’

15
Sep
2009

How to start your own business, easily.

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Making money online is really a lot simpler than most people would ever imagine, it really comes down to three easy steps.

First, you need to have a product people want to buy.

Second, you need to be able to sell the product to people.

Finally, you need to be able to collect money from people effectively.

What’s great about the Internet is that all these things are already completed!

Let’s say for example that you want to sell t shirts online. The first thing you’ll need is to find a t shirts wholesale supplier. Luckily, you can pick up a blank t shirt or several hundred blank shirts from a good company. The beauty of ordering blank t-shirts is that you can literally print straight from you computer to meet the needs of custom orders!

The second step? Using WordPress, a simple store can be setup which allows you to sell products to users locally or around the world. WordPress is a perfect solution for many small business owners because when it’s setup correctly it can take care of organic marketing, search engine optimization, site maps and other technical aspects automatically.

Finally, you need to  be able to accept payment and ship the goods to users. Using PayPal, you can quickly and easily accept online payments plus PayPal has built in integration to the US Postal Service for easy printing of mailing labels. PayPal even lets you buy and print stamps directly from their easy to use website.

So there you have, three easy steps to finding a supplier, building a website and accepting online payments for small business owners just venturing onto the web. If you have questions, I’d love to hear from you or if you’d like to add to the discussion please feel free to contribute your thoughts.

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Posted in Make Money Online, Marketing Advice

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19
Jun
2009

What do people really buy?

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Fresh Post at thingsidoformoney.com: What do people really buy?

Before I design a website for somebody, especially if I’m sitting down with a restaurant to talk about design a website for a restaurant or hotel, there’s something pretty basic that I try to figure out about my potential partner (building a website is more like a partnership to me), do they have the slightest clue what people really buy? Most of the time, they simply don’t.Read More

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Posted in Learning

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30
May
2009

What’s the biggest mistake you’re making on your website?

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We all make mistakes but when it comes to our online web businesses, it’s important that we fix our mistakes before they become crippling.

Keywords

A keyword (or Tag in WordPress lingo) is a word or phrase intended to help support the content that you’re reading on a specific page, not the entire website. People often overload pages with keywords which have no relevancy to the page they’re designing with the hopes that Google will fall for the trick. Google will not fall for it. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that Google will punish you for using unrelated keywords, which is mistake #1 on most websites.

Boring Content

Content matters, it’s a silly reality but you have to stop thinking about your visitors as a funny little line in an analytics program and begin caring about them as people. Every person who comes to your website should feel they are better off after reading your content. If they don’t you’re wasting their time and they will not come back, so write better content and watch your website traffic increase dramatically.

Failing to Reach Your Market

The old days of building a website and assuming people will find it are over (if they ever existed at all), website owners  need to tell people about their website and promote it everywhere. Make sure your site address is on your business cards, marketing materials, the side of your building, company vehicles, all of your online profiles and in prominent newsletters, magazines etc. Remember, if you don’t tell people about your website they won’t know it’s there.

Poor Titles

Writing for websites is easy, make sure you have a catchy title that will help people determine if they want to read your piece and then make sure it’s been properly placed in your HTML code. A great title needs to be in two places on a website, first it has to be in the <title></title> tags of your page but it should also be reflected in your <h1></h1> tags in the body of your content. This helps search engines know that your page is about your title by labeling the document but also by placing the title in an easy to read and powerful tag within your text.

Poor Structure

Web pages are a lot like books, they need structure for people to be able to read them. In this case, you want computer software such as FireFox, Safari and IE to read your pages as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo right? Well then, you’d better make sure your page is coded to their standards! Luckily, the W3C has a wonderful tool to help you ensure your page can be properly read.

Stale Content

If you’ve follow my advice, you know that your visitors are people not mindless data points on a graph so you have to respect that they simple won’t come back to your website if you don’t take the time to post anything new there. Work out a schedule that you can keep and write a blog posting at least once each week (more if you can) to provide your audience with fresh content.

Be Organic

While it’s acceptable and even encouraged to buy ads on services such as Google be careful that you’re building your client base through organic methods, not paid advertising. Google looks very poorly on paid link placement and has a reputation for punishing people excessively for buying links. If you really want to build your websites online reputation, do it honestly and take a little more time, in the end it’ll get you where you need to be.

Be Original

The web is a very big place and people have a lot of choice when it comes to content, so try to be original and write content people want to read. Ask yourself why you read specific websites and learn to improve your content to ensure people have a reason to come back. Once you have unique, original content others will start linking to your content because you’re an authority.

SEO is Irrelevant

Would you rather optimize your store for the local newspaper or for your customer? Stop looking to optimize your content for search engines, they’re irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong you have to make sure your content can be read by them and that your website is compatible with Google but stop treating your website content like it needs to be written to appeal to the big search engines and instead, write your content to appeal to people like your mother, your father, your kids and your neighbors. After all, they’re the ones who are reading your content … not a robot. 

Learn to be co-operative

The biggest mistake people make? Failing to ask other website owners to link to them. Search engines rankings work on a system called PageRank, the way PageRank works is by counting the number of links from other websites to your website, the more links you have coming into your website … the higher you rank on Google. If you want to be successful on the web, ask your friends and family as well as other related businesses to link to you.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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15
May
2009

How do I make money with AdSense?

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I think the Internet is awesome. There, I said it. The Internet is one of those amazing online places where anybody can make a great living and earn money while working from home. The web doesn’t make you go to work, it lets you stay home with your kids, work part time or even just earn cash after you’ve retired but the trick is that you need to know how to do it and I’m pretty easy going about telling people how to do it here on my site.

Get a website

The first step to making money on the Internet is to get a website. For those of you who think getting a website is hard work, you’re insane. Building a website is hard work but having one? It’s as easy as clicking a button and watching a few videos so step one to making money at home, sign up for a great hosting company like Bluehost and everything you need to get started.

Once you’ve signed up, installing an easy to manage website tool like WordPress is free and easy.

Get some advertising

What’s the biggest hurdle to making money on the Internet? The money dummy. Luckily Google makes it incredibly easy by offering a program called AdSense. How it works is pretty simple, you publish a website and they supply advertisers that what to put ads on websites about your subject matter. The more people visit your website, the more people see your ads and the more money you make. 

Write some content

So now you have a website and you have the ads setup so the next trick is to write content that people really want to read. Write often and write well, otherwise there is only one trick … write about something that people care to read about.

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Posted in Make Money Online, Questions and Answers

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27
Apr
2009

How much does a new web site cost?

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Websites are one of the funniest things to quote, literally a website range from absolutely nothing (Build a Website) or just $100 (Can you put up a website for less than $100?) to thousands, tens of thousands or even millions or dollars to build so how do I effectively answer a question like How much does a new web site cost?

Let’s look at a couple of different methods for estimating what you should spend on the web.

Do it yourself.

Technically, everything you need to build an effective website is already on your computer or can be downloaded from the Internet for free. As long as you have access to a few basic things, you’re set and the cost of building a website is nothing. Here’s what you’ll need:

  1. A text editor such as Notepad or Textedit
  2. An FTP client to connect to your hosting provider
  3. A hosting account on a web hosting provider
  4. A domain name
  5. Basic HTML skills and/or a copy of WordPress
  6. Knowledge of PHP or similar programming language

Hiring a Professional

If you don’t know how to do it yourself or prefer to hire a professional, the cost to build a website is pretty difficult to estimate because it involves two factors;

  1. How complicated is your website
  2. How expensive is your web professional

When you’re estimating how much time your website will take, I think it’s important to get three quotes from three qualified web professionals. As tempting as it is to work with just one, when it comes to the future of your business it’s a great idea to get a few different opinions but as for the quote itself? Expect it to range dramatically.

Sample Pricing

While I can’t speak for other designers / developers I can tell you that I know many web professionals who price themselves in one of three price ranges:

  • Entry Level – $20 – $35 / hr
  • Mid Career – $40 – $60 / hr
  • Senior Level – $75 – $100 / hr
  • Webmasters – $150 (+) /hr

One of the problems answering the question however is that the amount of time that it takes for somebody to do a job varies, even within the same career levels. For example, my time to SEO a website is fairly low because it’s what I specialize in but my great friend Chris Bavota does it just as fast even though he considers himself less experienced. On the other hand, my custom programming is faster in both prototyping and execution … his rich media on the other hand? Faster and cleaner than I could ever dream. This is why the same project, quoted from three designers / developers can be dramatically different.

A basic website – If your looking for a small website, using WordPress as a content manager, minor customizations to a theme, advice to select some great plugins and installation on a new domain name you should expect to pay for anywhere from three to ten hours of time plus consulting of course.

A large business website – Larger websites are significant investments for a company, while they’re equally difficult to judge one measure that I’ve found fairly accurate in the past is to look at the companies annual print advertising budget and assume the development of a website to compete will cost 75% of the existing budget for the first year and 50% for each additional year. 

For example, if your yellow page ad budget is $150 per month ($1,800/yr), you should anticipate your website costing ~$1,350 once completed. This of course represents between 10 and 60 hours of time for a web professional, depending on their experience and level.

A website just like X -  Just to put it out there (because I’m asked the about twice a month), building a website like another popular site is possible, so here are some quick estimates:

  • Facebook – 4,000 hours development & 300 hours per month marketing / maintenance
  • MySpace – ditto.
  • Elance – 2,500 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • eBay – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • Plenty of Fish – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance

What should you ask your web design firm?

There are a couple of things that I would always recommend you ask your web design firm before getting started with them.

  • Talk to some previous clients to see how responsive and supportive the firm was
  • Ask a few previous clients what the cost / timeline overruns turned out to be
  • Did they find working with the team pleasant?

Web designers are notoriously grumpy sometimes, so you should be able to forgive a little bit of that (it’s a stressful job, like working in a kitchen) but what matters (also like working in a kitchen) is how well the final piece turned out and if it got out on time.

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Posted in Questions and Answers

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15
Apr
2009

The Secret to Building Website Traffic

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There are a lot of blogs out there that talk about how to build website traffic but most of them are pitching an ebook or trying to get you to buy some elaborate Search Engine Optimization strategy that relies on complex (often underhanded) strategies to accomplish something that is fundamentally easy, yet time consuming.

That’s right … building an online presence is actually one of the easiest things a person will ever do in the lifetime of business, much easier than building a website or opening a retail location so why do so many people do it so badly? Fear, ignorance, uncertainty and shame.

Fear of the unknown, being ignorant of the unknown and being uncertain of where to start learning. It’s exactly the same reason I didn’t learn to cook until I was in my thirties or why I still don’t know how to change the gasket in my car. In fact, I don’t even know what a gasket is or which part of the car it might be found in but what separates me from most is that I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know anything about my car.

The Secret

A very complex UML diagram of the process.

A very complex UML diagram of the process.

So what is the secret to building web traffic? It’s radically simply, building web traffic is as simple as telling people about your business. Building quality web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and building sustainable web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and treating them with respect once they’ve taken the time to visit your business. It is the easiest thing you will ever do. Let’s break it down again in a more conventional lesson plan format:

  1. Tell people whom you believe will benefit by your business about your business.
  2. Ensure people are richer for having visited your business.
  3. Repeat.

Telling People About Your Website

If you’re proud of your website (and you should be), telling people about it should be a pleasure for you. It should reflect your personality and be an extension of your business so why not tell the world?

If you tell people about your website, they’ll come visit your website, it’s honestly that simple. So the art of building your online web presence is about telling as many appropriate people as you can about your website and help them easily find your website.

Telling the Right People About Your Website

The problem with telling people about your website is that many of the people you tell are simply not the right people and this is where SEO practices often fail. People tend to measure success by how many clicks their website gets but that’s a pointless statistic since you don’t really care about how many visitors you get … you care (or at least you should care) about the amount of money you get from that traffic.

In order to get the right traffic to your website, you first need to know who your traffic is. Many people start websites assuming the ‘right people’ are everywhere in the world but the simple truth is that most websites would be better off using the Internet as a method for their traditional market (local or regional) to access information faster so the first step in attracting website traffic is to determine if your business is better off appealing to:

  • a neighborhood, 
  • a city, 
  • a region, 
  • a state, 
  • the entire country, 
  • local counties or 
  • the entire world

Once you know that, ask yourself if your website appeals to men or women more. If it’s equal that’s great but you should be able to honestly determine it (for example, my website appeals to ~60% men but why?). Is your website for consumer or business traffic, people living in the suburbs or businesses in the heart of the city? Do you appeal to a specific industry or ethnic group? By narrowing these categories many might feel they’re limiting their market but it’s actually a process called niche marketing and allows your business to spend more money per prospective client while lowering the overall cost of a marketing campaign.

Now that you know who your market is, your goal is to Increasing Website Traffic for Free by participating in communities and building your relationships with others. Take part in forums, leave valid compliments on blogs and build traffic by helping others, this leads to a tremendous influx of quality traffic but more importantly it leads to an influx of legitimate business.

Giving the Right People a Reason to Tell People About Your Website

The biggest secret in building website traffic? Let others do it for you. Produce high quality content designed to help people and watch your website statistics sore as people tell their friends about your great tutorials, free downloads and useful tips.

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Posted in Marketing Advice

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25
Feb
2009

Build a Website

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So you want to build a website but you don’t know where to start? Surprisingly building a website is a fairly straight forward process and while you’re going to need to know a few things to get started, creating the actual website is a piece of cake.

The Domain Name

Control Panel
Creative Commons License photo credit: Tim Dorr

Your domain name is your branding on the web. Domain names are an important part of your online identity and should be choosen carefully. Apple Computers for example uses the domain name apple.com while Microsoft uses microsoft.com, a domain name should be easy to remember for your clients, ideally end with .com (you can also own .net, .org etc) and be related to your business.

Hosting

Once you have a domain name, building a website is easy except just like running a restaurant you’ll need to put it somewhere. Small businesses don’t really need to be all that concerned with hosting, a simple web hosting package will meet the needs of most businesses, which is why I recommend BlueHost. Web hosting is like renting space on the internet, it’s about making sure your website is always online.

Build a Website

Now that you have a domain name and hosting, you need to look at building a website for yourself. Throughout my website you fill find everything you need to build a website so I don’t want to repeat myself too much but needless to say, the most important part of building a small business website is content. That’s why when I build websites for customers I stress that before we push a single pixel around the screen, we have:

  1. An approved Sitemap (a list of all the pages on the website)
  2. A summary of the text, photos and graphics for each page

lame story web Build a Website imageSounds funny but in grade school these days, kids are trained how to build websites better than most professional web designers. Before kids can write a story, they first have to create a Story Web. This is a basic structure of a story which shows the key elements of a story. To the right, I’ve created what might be the lamest story web in history … but it’s still better than what a lot of business owners created for their website.

So, here’s the secret to building a website:

  1. Write down ten objectives, if you can’t think of ten … try harder
  2. Throw out five objectives, ten is too many
  3. Pick your main objective … that’s your homepage
  4. For each objective, add three points that makes your website special
  5. Turn each point into a paragraph

Congratulations, you’ve just built a Story Web (or sitemap) for your website. 

Now, give me a call if you’d like me to build a website for you, or take a look at these great articles to build one yourself:

  1. How to make a website for free
  2. Does your website help, or hurt your business?
  3. Get a Free Web Site

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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03
Oct
2007

Learning Web Design for Print Designers

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For those who don’t know the dirty little secret of designers, here it is … there are web designers and there are print designers. Rarely do the two specialties cross but it doesn’t have to be that way, great print designers can easily learn to be wonderful web designers without having to know a lot of coding and technical garbage.

First off, let’s be blunt and say the world of web design has changed a lot in the past few years so if your last attempt to build a website was five or six years ago, trust me … this is going to be painless. Building a website is made easier with Adobe Dreamweaver but there are still a few basics that you’ll need to understand before we get into the real world of web development. Before we begin let me be honest and tell you that I’m a stickler for Web Based Standards, follow the rules and nobody gets hurt, break the rules and you’ll spend the rest of your design career wishing you’d listened.

Building a website is broken into two distinct areas, first there’s Web Publishing and then there is Web Design. This of your website design software as Adobe InDesign, before you can design your amazing page layout you have to format your text. The web is really no different.

Web Publishing

To help us publish a new website, you’ll really only need to know a handful of codes and to be honest, Dreamweaver takes care of them all for you. The first code you should know is the <p> tag, it’s a paragraph and when you wrap the code around a bunch of text, the web browser knows that those words represent a paragraph. For example:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi nec dui. Integer urna lacus, vehicula id, dictum at, cursus at, metus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque condimentum lectus aliquam libero.</p>

That’s it, that’s the basic foundation for HTML. Now remember, if you’re using Dreamweaver the software will add the <p> tags on it’s own, you don’t have to add them unless you’re in code view (View > Code to see the code or View > Design to see the design).

If you want to force a line return in a desktop publishing application we use Shift-Enter and that will force a new line. Well in the wonderful world of HTML we have a similar command it’s <br />. Note the closing / in the code? It’s because <br></br> looks silly, so we combine the opening and closing of a tag into a single object, hence <br/>.

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. <br />Morbi nec dui. Integer urna lacus, vehicula id, dictum at, cursus at, metus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque condimentum lectus aliquam libero.</p>

Take note in the example above that HTML doesn’t care about the actual format of the code, <br /> will insert a line break when viewed in a web browser and it’ll ignore the code when viewing the code. Likewise, the code view doesn’t recognize breaks in the code, so the follow example means nothing to HTML:

<p>Lorem

ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit. <br />Morbi nec dui. Integer urna lacus, vehicula id, dictum at, cursus at, metus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque condimentum lectus aliquam libero.</p>

So now you’ve learnt the first two critical tags of HTML. Remember, HTML isn’t about producing amazing graphics it’s about publishing documents to the web. These two tags may seem silly to a designer but to an information architect they’re the most powerful tools in the world.

Next up, we need a basic way to break up HTML into headings and indicated how important text is. For that, we turn to the mighty heading tag, in fact it’s so cool there are six of them. <h1><h2><h3><h4><h5><h6> each of which has a rather unremarkable closing tag, </h6></h5></h4></h3></h2></h1>. Using the proper heading tag outside of a paragraph will indicated how important your text is for both the audience and search engines such as Google.

<h1>My Great Text</h1>

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi nec dui. Integer urna lacus, vehicula id, dictum at, cursus at, metus.</p>

<h2>Less Important Text</h2>

Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque condimentum lectus aliquam libero.</p>

There you have it, the greatest secret in the universe … how to effectively publish web documents. Actually there are a few other things that you’ll need to know for example if you want to place emphases text and make it appear as an italic on the page, you’ll need to wrap the <em></em> tags around the words you want to effect. Bolding words is accomplished with the <strong></strong> tags, you’ll notice that I don’t use the <i> and <b> tags which the W3C has asked us very politely not to use any more.

Adding an image to your page is a little more complex, basically it’s the <img /> tag but you have to add an optional tag to it so the tag reads <img src=’???’> where the src (source) is equal to the path to your image. Adding a list is fairly easy, first you have to decide if you want an ordered list (numbered) in which case use the <ol></ol> tags or an unordered list (bullets) <ul></ul>. List items contained within the list, have to be wrapped in a <li></li> tag.

<h1>My Great Text</h1>

<p><img src=’path_to_file/filename.gif’>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi nec dui. Integer urna lacus, vehicula id, dictum at, cursus at, metus.</p>

<ul>
<li>Donec sed eros in felis dictum euismod.</li>
<li>Nunc quam orci, elementum molestie, porttitor eu, faucibus eget, quam. </li>
</ul>

<h2>Less Important Text</h2>

Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Quisque condimentum lectus aliquam libero.</p>

<ol>
<li>Donec sed eros in felis dictum euismod.</li>
<li>Nunc quam orci, elementum molestie, porttitor eu, faucibus eget, quam. </li>
</ol>

I kid you not, that’s all there is to publishing HTML web content. Any graphic designer who can figure out how to use Quark or InDesign should be able to publish web content within an hour of starting.

Keep an eye out for my next piece, Web Design which will cover the secret art of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which turns your raw and ugly web content into stunning design while still complying to Web Standards.

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Posted in Learning, Web Site Advice

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22
Jan
2005

How to Hire a Web Designer

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It’s no secret, the world has gone to the Web and nowadays, if you want to be in business you need a website but how do you hire a web designer and should you hire a web designer here in Fredericton or from a big city? Before we begin, lets answer some basic questions.

Why Do I need a Web Site?

A Web site is never closed, it never calls in sick, it’s available to people here in the capital region and around the world.

Your website is first place clients will go to find updated information, contact details and product support, it’s a great communication tool for developing member listings, mailing lists or to just share information with the public.

A local charity may want to encourage potential members and volunteers, or provide a newsletters without the expense of monthly printing. Childrens groups may want to post their schedules, offer a message board for parents to co-ordinate rides, and include maps to camps, games for the kids or tips on how to tie knots.

Unlike one-time selling strategies, a Website is online all the time and can always be up to date.

Can I Build My Own Web Site?

Sure you can, building a website is pretty fast, pretty easy and pretty painless if you know what you’re doing but so is doing your taxes, planning your retirement, fixing your car or tailoring a suit … if you happen to have the time, experience, training and equipment to do it right, otherwise you’re best to hire a professional.

How Do I Find a Designer?

There’s a nasty secret to finding a good web designer … before you can find one, you have to know what to look for and by the time most people know what to look for, they might as well have learnt to do it themselves. So how does a small business person find a good designer without being overwhelmed?

Referrals are your best bet, call Enterprise Fredericton, the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce, look online at the local design group (Fredericton Designers) or take a look at local websites, many web designers include a small link to their website on the bottom of each page.

Once you’ve compiled a list of Web designers and/or developers from the sources of your choice, you need to do some serious homework and

Now the real fun begins …

Local vs. Around the World

The wonderful thing about designers is that a good designer is a wonderful thing but does it matter if they’re here in Fredericton or half way around the world? That really depends on what you need, what you want and what they offer.

Don’t rule anybody out at this stage, a great design half way around the world might be able to deliver your needs too. Before you hire a designer, you should have a list of at least ten potential designers at this stage.

What to Look For

Hiring a designer is a big deal and there are lots of things to consider, check out their websites, talk to them and ask yourself these questions:

* Can I easily find my way around their website or the websites of their clients?
* Do I like their style, does the navigation make sense?
* Does their website have broken links, broken graphics or crazy mistakes?
* Are the pages consistent?
* Is the information easy to find?
* Are things aligned properly?
* Is the text easy to read, is it spelt correctly?
* Do the pages load fast and properly?
* Do links open onto the same page?

With any luck, you’ve answered yes to all these questions because if a designer can’t build their own site properly, can you really trust them to build yours?

Next, check their portfolio; do you see sites that you like? Can you visit several client sites and see consistent quality, attention to detail and effective use of technology?

Now lets look at their experience, has the business created sites for people in your industry? If so, did they do a good job?

If their website offers testimonials, read them and find out what clients thought of the skills and services of the Web designer.

Finally, be very careful of designers who can ‘do it all’. Web design is a speciality and while it is possible to be very good at several things, I have never met a person capable of offering all things to all people.

Working with a designer vs. a design firms is a choice you’ll have to make on your own, there are benefits to each and you’ll quickly find that both offer excellent services.

Now that you’ve reviewed your top 10 choices, select the best five and prepair a list, it’s time to put together an RFP (Request for Proposal) and learn more about their abilities.
The Request for Proposal

In order to ensure you get exactly the feedback you want from your designer, there are some basic questions you should ask, information you should provide and resources to include in your RFP.

Requests for Proposals shall contain the following sections:

* Executive Summary outlining your company
* Client information and target markets
* Sample URLs of styles you like
* Your logo, branding, product details and images.
* A description of your business
* Your goals, timelines and technology requirements
* Do you need hosting, photography, content writing, marketing support, databases, training, design, publishing, ongoing maintenance … let the designer know exactly what you need.
* Budgets (if applicable)
* Terms and conditions

Reviewing the RFP’s

When you get your proposals back, pay special attention to their pricing and guarantees, prices for services can vary dramatically but you can’t select your designer on price alone, look at the content of their proposal and what they are offering for the money.

What are the designers’ payment schedules? Do they guarantee their work? Are they professional? Does your designer ask for weekly payments or milestone payments?

Review the proposals, ask questions and review the feedback until you are able to narrow your list of five designers down to just three.
Last Steps: Contact and Check References

Ask the designers for a few references and call them. Hiring a bad designer can be easily avoided if you talk to previous clients and ask important questions:

* Is the designer polite on the phone?
* Does the designer lend their expertise?
* Does the designer listen and work with your needs?
* Did you feel you were well treated?
* Would you work with the designer again?
* Did they deliver what they promised?
* Did they deliver it on time?
* Are they pleasant to work with?
* Did the designer talk over your head?
* Was the designer reliable?
* Was the designer professional?

Don’t be afraid to contact a previous client directly, each provider probably has a portfolio on their website, call the former client or send them an e-mail, you’re looking to hire a designer and invest a significant amount of money in a project, you have the right to know if you can rely on them.

Lastly, have a meeting with the designer in person or on the telephone and go walk through the site with them, you can pick your designer from the three you’ve talked to based on references, portfolio and professionalism.
Your Web Site Will Thank You

It may seem like a lot of work but it’s worth it, your designer is building your online presence, you’re spending thousands of dollars and committing to project that will last for years, it pays to do your homework!
About the author:

Christopher Ross, UE is the owner of Getaway Graphics, a premier web design and marketing firm, focussing on helping small businesses build websites that get results. You can contact him at 506-452-1595 or at info@getawaygraphics.com

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