The key to designing a good website is to have a plan in place and execute it. What seems to happen with many new websites being subpar is the lack of an ingredient in the formula. Sometimes you will find a functional website that is ugly as sin, other times you will have a beautiful website with archaic or useless functions. Then there are the ones who have a bit of both but no direction, they either have way too many options or a lack thereof. Nothing is worst than a confusing website, especially those that ion loses you when you can’t figure out how to navigate to the particular pages. Maybe he has a hieroglyph to represent “About Us” but you don’t think to rollover it to see if it will give you the English variation. This is a complex problem being that it can either be the fault of the overbearing Art Director, the naïve Web Designer or the hands-on business owner who knows nothing of the Web but thinks he does. When the problem does arise however, everybody loses, the Art director will blame the Web Designer, the Web designer will not get a referral and the business owner will receive zero return on investment. So how do you avoid this?

Hire an expert and let him do his job

This is simple management but many of us lose sight of it when we are passionate about a goal. Some people simply cannot trust someone even if they researched the person and know that they have the credentials to do the job. The last thing you want for a professional to be is aloof about your baby and you must realize that the more push that you apply to the function and creativity the less likely that professional will apply the extra magic needed to make your project shine. What will result from it is a good site but due to a soured relationship (due to your micro managing out of ignorance) it will not be a great site. Here are 4 things you should look for when selecting a source for having your site built and they can be the key to making or breaking your dream.

Extensive Portfolio Research
Scan the designer’s past works, make sure that he truly created the sites and that they are of a functional and professional manner. If you are looking for database programming, E-Commerce or a dynamic type of web design, you may have to split your resources into two and hire both a Graphic Designer  (make sure she has some web design abilities) and a Coder. The reason I stated that the Graphic Designer should have web abilities is because you need a smooth transition between design and code. To have a designer give you the most amazing layout only to find out that you are getting charged 3 times the amount due to more work from your coder is not ideal.  You are looking for someone who can make it look good within the confines of current Web Design. To avoid this step may land you with a hack that has done a few sites poorly, struggling to piece your site together through sloppy code, buggy methods and bad design. You will end up paying someone down the line to re-design in correctly and it will mean more money for you and your company.

Figure out a good resource for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Above all else if your site is being built to pull in audiences from the World Wide Web then you do not want to be non-existent on search engines. Make sure your Web Designer knows up front that you are going to want prominence on search engines and do some research on a good company that can make it happen for you after the design is complete. Some companies offer all-in-one but you must be careful of this since SEO is a great big beast all on its own. Just be careful with this because I get a ton of clients who brazenly announce that they want to be “first on Google” but aren’t willing to weather the time or pay the amount it takes to get even close to this. Do some research on SEO for yourself and get educated on it, you must realize that your business, the keywords you select and your 1,000 competitors all play a role in how far you rank.

Make sure your website has a point
There are many reasons to have a website, it can be a virtual business card, a virtual store, or a home base. What you don’t want is to have a meaningless website. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a pamphlet on a business or meeting a salesperson who gives you the introduction to the company only to visit the site and feel like you wasted your time. “Oh this is a nice website but there’s nothing here”, ever have one of these moments? Some business owners are told “you need a website”, but when you think of cause and effect, do you really need one? One can argue that it is fairly cheap to have a site so why not, the younger generation lives and breathes the internet so why leave them out? This makes perfect sense but make sure it has something that rewards the visitor. A form to join up, a registration, a contact us that is more than your name and number, a coupon to print out and bring into the store… SOMETHING, anything.

A Web Master for Maintenance
If you don’t feel like blogging about your company’s progress or setting up a comments section so that your customers can share information then you need to have some sort of periodical updates. You need to capitalize on return visitors and having a stagnant site will not tempt people to bookmark you. Get the maintenance rates from a good Web Master, get on a monthly or bi-monthly plan and keep your content fresh, relative and up to date.

These are only a few steps to getting a good site together but they arguably some of the more important steps. Remember to scan that portfolio well and make a collection of sites you find interesting to emulate. Provide the designer with these examples at the very beginning of the layout process and leave the coding up to the coders. If you are not a Web Master yourself or a Graphic Designer, just remember that it won’t benefit you to try and play one when it becomes time to have your website built. You will find that the entire process does not have to be a chore after all.