Image Courtesy Slate

When looking to build a new website, many business owners mistakenly think that a gorgeous new site is the answer. While aesthetically pleasing design is certainly important, it is only one component of a good overall online strategy.

You must first establish who your target is, and then what you want them to do. In other words, who is my demographic, and what business problem am I solving. Your fantastic new site may be pretty, but if it doesn’t address these two questions first and foremost, you have just wasted your money.

It is therefore crucial that you work with your designer to establish design guidelines that answer these questions. If your web design company isn’t experienced with basic marketing principles, you need to call in help. If you don’t have a marketing department, bring in a consultant to work with you and your designer on the project.

Second, a house is just a building, but a home is full of things and people. An effective website looks nice and works well, but more importantly it has great content. The content, the pure words on your site, is what provides value to current and potential customers. The content on your site establishes a tone that should also be reflected in the design, and not vice versa.

There are many great web designers out there without a clue in terms of marketing. That’s not necessarily a reason not to work with them, though. If their eye for aesthetics and good, usable design is what you want, but they don’t a clue how to market your product, bring in reinforcements early in the process. You and your designer will be glad you did.

Working with a web designer to get your site launched is quite a process in itself. But what happens after your new website is up is equally important.

CMS Training

If your new website is built using a content management system (CMS), it will incumbent upon you to make content updates after your site launches. Depending on the technical expertise of your staff, this may require some training.

You should ask your web design shop if they can offer any sort of training with the CMS in which your site is built, whether it’s WordPress, Drupal, or something else. If they do not offer training, find out if they have any recommended sources to conduct this training.

You can also look to online sources such as Lynda.com, which features online technical training in a wide variety of topics and fields. All of this training, whether in-person or online, has some cost associated with it, so be prepared and build this expense into your web budget. Whatever you do, don’t let your great new website languish for lack of knowledge in how to update it.

Photo and Image Rights

If your site requires custom photography, you need to be certain about who owns those photos. Some photographers license their work for periods of one or more years, requiring you the client to pay additional fees for using those images after the allotted time period. Other photographers sell the rights to their work in perpetuity, meaning once they turn their work over to you, you own it. Make sure to negotiate your photo contract so it works for you.

Web designers sometimes work the same way, with any custom graphics they create either being licensed for a term or in perpetuity. Don’t let yourself be surprised by an unexpected invoice down the line, long after you’ve parted ways with your design shop. Make sure the graphic licensing is clear up front.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

In preparing a request for proposals (RFP) and a project scope, it may seem as though half the work of developing a new website is creating documents. These documents are essential in ensuring the project stays on time, on scope, and on budget.

Documentation does not end once your site is launched. It is essential that you maintain documentation of changes and updates. This mostly applies to the structure and design of the site itself, as well as any features, applications and plug-ins that may be installed after launch.

Change and update documentation becomes critical when there is a problem with your site, or when it’s time for more design and development work. You should be able to show what is different from the original scope to facilitate easier discovery and diagnosis of problems, as well as demonstrating needs for new features.

This documentation can be as simple as maintaining an open web updates project within your project management system. When any significant change or update is made, the person responsible should document it in the project. That way they are stored and available for all to see should they be needed.

Sites using a content management system (CMS) will usually feature version control, meaning that previous iterations of content are saved in the CMS. If changes are made to the content that are wrong or problematic, rather than recreating previous work you can “roll back” that page to the previous version. Therefore change documentation for content itself isn’t really necessary.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dewey_Bridge_Fire_4-06-2008.jpg

Not every product or project is a success. Even the most successful companies turn out clunkers on a regular basis. Web design projects are no different. There may come a time when despite everyone’s best efforts and the money already spent that it becomes necessary to start over from scratch.

Here are some signs that it may be time to find a new web designer:

Consistently Misses Deadlines

When a web design project is planned out, deadlines are put in place so that the expectations are clear for all involved. You have business problems to solve, and you are relying on your web design company to get you there. Consistently missing deadlines is a clue that there are problems on their end, and that they may not be the right fit for your needs.

Lack of Communication

Nobody likes yelling just to hear their own voice. If you send repeated emails and leave many voice mails for your web designer, and they don’t reply to you for days, there is a problem. Even if they are meeting deadlines, it’s not sufficient to disappear for days or weeks on end only to turn up with the final product on deadline day. There are always questions and clarifications that come up along the way. If they’re not asking them, worry. If you can’t get a timely response, they’re not living up to their end of the bargain.

Refusal to Take Direction

While design quibbles and differences of opinion are to be expected, a designer must be able to take direction. Sometimes you may have ideas that are just plain bad, either from a design standards or usability standpoint. Your designer should be able to explain this situation to you, because after all they’re the expert and that’s their job. But for more simple matters, no matter what their own particular aesthetic sensibility, you are the client and you’re paying the bill. Your designer needs to recognize this.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coliseum-of-Rome.JPG

A web design project can be a daunting task. You may have many business problems you need to solve with your website. Add in the fact that it can seem as though you and your web designer speak a different language, and it may seem like your website will never be finished.

Guess what: it won’t ever be finished. The web is a living, breathing entity that constantly shifts and evolves to meet its own needs and adapt to its environment. Therefore you can’t think of your website as a static “thing” that needs to be “finished.”

For a major web design project, it is preferable and more realistic to think and plan in phases. You may be undertaking a major overhaul that involves many complicated new elements to your website. A small tweak here or there can cause a problem elsewhere. Phasing your launch can help ensure that each new set of features works properly and doesn’t wreak havoc on those already in place.

I often compare designing a website to building a house: you can’t pick the color of the curtains until you’ve poured the foundation. Concentrate on the immediate task or tasks at hand, and plan according to a logical progression of steps.

The first phase is usually the aesthetic phase: the information architecture and the visual look and feel. Phase two often involves the more complex elements like e-commerce and database tie-ins. Sometimes there are even three or four phases. As each phase is completed, site visitors are gradually eased into the features and processes of your site.

When sitting down for initial planning meetings with your web designer, make sure they are helping you properly assess your needs, and don’t be afraid to launch in phases.

As they say on a prominent fashion TV show, one minute you’re in and the next you’re out. The same holds true for websites. There was a day when putting up a ready-made site on Geocities was the pinnacle of the web. Today we have much more sophisticated tools and techniques at our disposal.

As you plan your web design project with your design shop, it’s important to keep in mind that what works today won’t work forever. Equally important is that your website has a global reach, one that should portray the right image of you and your business.

With that in mind, here are three ways websites are like suits:

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

When going on a job interview, it’s unthinkable to wear shorts and a t-shirt, even if that’s what your current situation dictates. Champagne dreams on a beer budget are one thing, but there’s no reason why your website should look cheap. There are literally thousands of templates and themes, both paid and free, that can serve as starting points for your site.

If you can’t afford to pay a designer through the entire process, try working from a pre-designed theme and customizing it to suit your needs and your branding to save time and money off your budget. You will end up with a site that looks like the business you want to be, rather than where you might be today.

The best fit comes from tailoring, not off the rack.

Starting with a template is a great way to get your web design project rolling. Using a pre-made theme with no changes is not. You wouldn’t buy a Saab, rip the logo off the front, and resell it as a Kia. Make sure when your designer starts with a template that they customize it not only for your business’ colors and style, but also for the functionality you need.

Styles change.

That tangerine-colored double-breasted jacket looked great on Miami Vice, but now it sits in the back of your closet serving as moth food. The web evolves at a frenetic pace, and visual styles move right alongside. Your website should be refreshed at least once every two years, ideally more often. You must use your site to display your flexibility and relevance to your customers. So don’t shy away from updating even though it costs money.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

The most important part of the web design process is the very beginning. The initial stage of a design project is where you decide what your priorities are and what the site is supposed to do. Developing these priorities and the plan for moving forward is usually known as strategy.

Strategy begins before a web design shop does anything. It should start with your internal staff who will be on the project brainstorming notes on both your current website (including the features you want to keep and those you don’t) and your new one (what should it include?).

Web strategy doesn’t require fancy documentation or snazzy presentations. The best web strategies often start with a piece of paper and a pen. All ideas are valid at this point, and putting them into a formalized business document can make them feel concrete and final. So just write things down.

Diagrams are also really useful. Examine your online sales process, or the one you hope to have. Make a flowchart of how you think the customer experience should ideally go on your new site. Start with their initial visit to your site and take it all the way through the completion of their purchase.

What you’re looking to create is a content mission. What functions should your website serve? What problem or problems should it solve? These questions should be considered both from the viewpoint of your own company, but also from that of your consumer.

Once you’ve got your strategy down, then it’s time to bring in your web design shop. They will be able to quickly and easily digest your strategy into a set of recommendations and a development plan that meets your needs.

As you investigate designs for your website, you will undoubtedly run across plenty of websites with pre-built themes. These themes are usually built for content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, but there are still HTML themes being made.

Your initial response might be one of distrust. Why would you pay someone thousands of dollars to just install a ready-made theme and call it your website? This reaction is understandable, but unwarranted.

One of the main advantages to choosing to use a CMS is exactly this kind of extensibility. Themes are a great way to standardize the construction and operation of your website. They include many features that may otherwise have to be developed from scratch with a totally custom design. In this way, starting with a theme can cut development time drastically.

Themes and the CMSs that use them are also built using development standards that any web design shop or developer should know. Let’s say you bring in a new designer a couple of years from now or hire an in-house web team. They won’t have to take time learning the intricacies of a one-off custom setup.

Finally, just because you and your designer pick a theme doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it. The theme can be regarded as a starting point, a framework from which to develop your own site with its unique look and feel.

Think of it this way: every time Volkswagen comes out with a new car, they don’t reinvent the car from scratch. They take what they already know, mix in elements of previous models and designs, and end up with something new and different. When it’s time for a new web design, your design shop will work up the theme, apply it, and your website is magically refreshed with all the same content still in place.

It is important to note that there are free and paid themes. Free themes are fine, and are often quite useful. For a larger, more enterprise-level website, you should probably consider a commercial theme. These paid themes usually offer ongoing support and updates as new web technologies are developed, again decreasing development time on your end.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

There are plenty of web design firms who also specialize in search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, some of them engage in techniques that range from dubious to downright ineffective.

When hiring a web designer, make sure they’re expert in proven, above-board SEO techniques that are guaranteed to work. If your design shop doesn’t have in-house resources to do so, ask them for recommendations for an external SEO resource who can help both you and your designer optimize your site properly.

Here are some proven techniques you should expect from your designer or SEO company:

Develop Appropriate Keywords
Gone are the days of simply stuffing your site’s metadata with keywords to boost search rankings. Search engines are smarter now, and thus keywords must be utilized differently to be effective. Relevant keywords and phrases must now be included in the site content itself. To help determine what those keywords should be, you can use free tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Optimize All Pages and Page Titles
Page titles are the first thing search engines see when crawling your site. Make sure the titles accurately reflect the page’s exact content. For example, a page title like “Savings” probably won’t be as effective as “Online Coupons.” These same specific keywords and phrases should be reflected in the content on the relevant pages in that section of your site.

Label Links and Images
Search engines prioritize links partially by how those links are described: the little pop-up that appears when you hover over a link. “Learn more” isn’t as effective as “Find more information about online coupons.” And definitely stay away from “Click here,” as this is simply not enough information for search engines or users. Describe exactly what the user will get by clicking, and search engines will categorize and prioritize those links as well.

Create an Effective Site Map
Providing a site map not only helps users find what they’re looking for, but it ensures that search engines can understand exactly what is on your site, where it is and how all pages relate to each other. The more specific links you provide to deep content on your site, the better it will be spidered and thus the better search results will be delivered.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

The job of a web designer is to solve business problems for their clients. The only truly effective way to solve problems is for the parties on both sides of the issue to understand each other. Rather than talking past each other, you and your web design shop can do small things to gain a great deal of common understanding and trust.

Help Them Understand
Web designers are experts in what they do: applications, data implementation and user interface. You are the expert in your field, whatever that may be. A designer shouldn’t assume you know anything about the web, and you shouldn’t assume your designer knows anything about your field.

You should provide specific details about your company, your products, and what problems you are trying to solve. Instead of speaking in abstracts like “Make it pop” or “It should feel warm,” you can help your designer by laying out concrete details.

Both Sides Should Win
A web designer’s priority is to satisfy the client, as their future business depends on their portfolio. Your priority is to get your website built and go on about the business of running your company.

The surest route to a mutual win is to be prepared to negotiate. You may be dead set on certain ideas about how you want your website to look and operate. Trust your designer when they push back with alternative recommendations to certain requests, as they usually have good, solid reasons for doing so–often with data to back it up.

When both you and your designer are flexible and rational, both sides win.

Learn From Your Designer
You are emotionally tied to your business, and for good reason: it’s yours! Sometimes we make decisions or establish preference based on emotional reasons rather than pragmatic, rational ones.

Take the opportunity that comes with working with a professional designer to learn from them about their trade. This will help you gain a key understanding of what is involved in the web design process, and help guide your future decisions and requests.

Hiring a web designer can be scary. It’s a bit like going to see a doctor: they have a wealth of knowledge in a field with which you’re unfamiliar, and they use lingo and jargon to describe what they’re doing. It is therefore easy to get taken by an unscrupulous designer or developer and end up paying more than you should.

There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence of web design shops ripping off clients, bilking them for days of development time for simple additions and updates. The single best way to prevent being taken for a ride is to do your homework beforehand. Here are some simple examples:

Agree on a Project Scope
Web design projects, sort of like road construction, are notorious for ending up behind schedule and over budget. Establishing a scope of work before work begins is the easiest way to keep timelines and budgets in check.

This project scope should also include agreed-upon rates for future updates once your website launches. Familiarize yourself with standard hourly rates for the various kinds of updates that may be needed, and agree on them up front.

Get Multiple Quotes
When submitting for proposals for your web design project, don’t take the first offer that comes along. Make sure you get multiple quotes for the job. If the quotes vary wildly, either the designer didn’t understand your requirements or someone is trying to take you for your money. It’s your business, it’s your project: make sure you’re getting the most for what you’re paying.

Get a Second Opinion
If you really have no idea whatsoever about what goes into web design, bring in someone who does. This could be an outside opinion, or it could be an in-house project manager. As a business owner you don’t necessarily need to know every little detail along the way. There is a tremendous security that comes with having someone who has a handle on every step of a project, and who can advise you when you’re unsure.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

In the old days of the web (two or three years ago), pretty much all a business had to do in order to sell products on the web was hang out their shingle: put up a website, add ecommerce, and watch the orders roll in.

Now the internet is a very different environment, with an evolving emphasis on “real time” in search and interaction. This real time nature demands a new model for dealing with your website, a content strategy. This content strategy is proactive, rather than reactive. Rather than responding to new situations and demands, a company must be out in front of developments, publishing new, current content on a regular basis.

Without a strategy, it is impossible to get ahead. Search engines today respond to constant updates and fresh content. Marketing yourself on Facebook, Twitter and the like is impossible without a stream of new information and ideas emanating from within your company. That’s why a forward-looking plan is absolutely essential.

Here are some of the components that make up a sound content strategy:

Blog
A blog that is hosted on your own website that integrates your static web content with constantly updated news, information and insights about your company and products will go a long way toward achieving content freshness. It also provides an avenue for customer feedback via comments, and gives search engines a steady supply of new content and pages to spider, helping bump up your site in search results.

Mission
Before beginning your blog and online content strategy, you must have a mission. What is the purpose of your site? What is your blog going to cover? How will you ensure that all content you produced is relevant and useful to your audience of current and prospective customers?

Your mission must include more than just information about products. It should provide critical news and insights into your industry, how-to guides, and other content that will keep people coming back time and again. By ensuring that your content keeps within this mission, you will provide timely information that is timely and relevant.

Search Engine Optimization
A website and blog without search engine optimization (SEO) is like a publisher releasing a book but not making it available to libraries and bookstores. How will anyone find out about this timely, useful content and you and your industry if it’s not searchable? Part of your content strategy must include SEO tactics like the use of keywords, categories, properly labeled images and file names.

Social Media
Beyond SEO, you can proactively share information with the general public by utilizing social media. A basic Facebook fan page and Twitter account will allow you to instantly push out all your content updates, news and announcements. Customers should begin to “follow” or “like” your updates, subscribing to them so they are the first to know when you’ve got something new to say.

Asking for trite design and content not only frustrates your web designer, but including these cliches in your website will also annoy your users. The vast majority of your website visitors are savvy enough to understand that they are, in fact, using the internet. There’s no need to remind them that another website is just a click away by relying on worn-out design and text.

We previously discussed some well-worn cliches of the web design world. Here are a few more examples:

“Welcome to our website”

This is one that just refuses to die. First off, it’s just silly. Of course site visitors are on your website. Whether they got there via search and were really looking for something else, or they are repeat visitors to your site with specific needs, they should be able to recognize instantly where they are and what need your site fulfills. Adding a welcome message serves absolutely no purpose.

Second, everything on your website should serve an informational purpose. Whether it’s to entertain, to educate or to sell, there should be no extraneous text. The actual information on your site–the images, navigation and content–should serve as their welcome. Learn to edit ruthlessly and cut the fluff.

Flash page takeovers

In the early days of Flash, it was popular to have a “talking head” type of Flash introduction. Upon entering a website, users would be confronted with an overlay of a person, either real animated, welcoming them to the website. Sometimes the user was forced to sit through an entire spiel before being able to get rid of the overlay and get on with their business. Repeat visitors were treated to the same annoyance every time they went to that website.

While a great novelty at one point, like a dashboard-mounted turntable in a car, it’s an idea with no real purpose. In fact, these “takeovers” only serve to annoy users and delay them from getting to the real point: browsing your site and buying something.

Auto-play music

Much like the above example, music that automatically starts playing when a site is visited is a major annoyance. Just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. For instance, it’s possible to hit every visitor to your house in the face with a pie, but it’s really not the ideal way to welcome them to your home.

Plus, what if someone is visiting your site in a quiet environment like the library or their workplace? Invariably everyone in their vicinity is blasted with whatever your choice of music, which is both startling and distracting.

Web designers and developers understand that not everyone speaks their language. Part of the job is to translate what you the customer wants into actionable design priorities.

Keeping in mind that designers are often called upon to make many, many websites, they tend to see the same things crop up time and again. Nothing makes a designer grit their teeth than requests for the same old, tired cliches. Here are a few you should avoid.

“Make it pop.”

Text and images on a screen don’t pop. Balloons pop. Popcorn pops. Visual flair is a subjective judgement, and any good designer will have training and experience working with color palettes that are designed to be pleasing.

As the old saying goes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Be specific and thoughtful in your requests. Don’t ask your designer to “make it pop.” Instead, try something like “Can I see in more contrasting colors?” or “How would that look with a different font?”

“Click here”

Albert Einstein once said that “What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.” While he obviously lived and died long before the advent of the internet, I like to believe he was thinking ahead to the use of “click here” on websites.

“Click here.” You see it everywhere. And it’s wrong on so many levels.

From a web design standpoint, any item that is intended to be clicked should be apparent as clickable. A colorful button that says “Contact Us” is obviously a link to a contact page. A section of text in a contrasting color that is underlined is the most basic form of hyperlinking, and is common knowledge. Links should have all the visual cues your users need to recognize them as such.

It’s also bad form. Naming the link “Click here” is bad form, as the user should be told what they’re getting by clicking. This will also help with search engine optimization, as search engines will understand what’s behind every link they’re following if they are descriptive: “Find more recipes for summer cocktails” is clearly better than “Click here.”

Besides, “Click here” is just plain redundant. You’re already on the internet, and you navigate through and between websites by clicking links. Telling users to click on something on a website is like telling them to get into their “Car for driving.”

Crayon font

Many websites dedicated to kids or to children’s charitable causes make heavy use of text that appears to have been written in crayon, usually in a childlike scrawl using a variety of primary colors.

The major problem here is that this text must be an image, because browsers cannot display handwritten fonts. Therefore you are automatically stifling potentially good search results by using non-standard fonts or images as replacements.

Secondly–and this is something of a judgement call–childlike fonts are pandering. The manual in your car’s glove compartment isn’t written in axle grease just because it deals with an automobile. Sloppy crayon style text to indicate “children” is just not necessary.

Overused stock images

The proliferation of sites like istockphoto.com and shutterstock.com has made it easy for anyone to purchase high quality photographs and save money over hiring a photographer to do custom work. This in and of itself isn’t a problem. It’s when everyone uses the same images on their websites that this becomes an issue.

Ever see the board room full of smiling, racially diverse employees? Or the close-up of to hands grasped in a handshake? Probably more than you can count. Don’t choose these for your site. Your company is unique, so why use the same photos as everyone else? If your designer submits this type of imagery in their design, it’s probably time to find someone else with a keener, more sophisticated eye.

Image courtesy WikiMedia Commons

If you’ve never worked with a web design company before, on first meeting them you may hear a dizzying array of terminology and acronyms. The designer isn’t trying to impress you with jargon, they’re just speaking the language of the industry. It is extremely helpful if the client has some idea of what the designer is talking about, as both can communicate more clearly. Here are some frequently used terms in web design.

bounce rate
A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit one page of the site, usually via a search engine, and exit the site without clicking through to any other pages. This can be because the user was looking for something else. However, a high bounce rate can be an indicator of bad navigation, site design, or content.

landing page
A landing page is one a visitor sees when they first enter your site. The homepage of your site is one example of a landing page. If a website is very large, each main section of the site may have its own landing page. The function of a landing page is to describe what is contained in the content pages behind it.

new visitor
A new visitor to a site is one who has never come to a website before. This type of information can be gleaned from your website’s analytics. A high number of new visitors is always great, but only if those new visitors become repeat visitors and/or customers.

organic search
Organic search results are those search results for specific terms that are not paid advertisements or paid search results. Organic search is often seen by users as more trustworthy than paid. You should engage in good search engine optimization practices in order to increase your organic search ranking.

repeat visitor
A repeat visitor to a website is one who comes back to the same website regularly or even frequently. If your site has a good number of repeat visitors, it means your site has value for those people.

Image courtesy WikiMedia Commons

If you’ve never worked with a web design company before, on first meeting them you may hear a dizzying array of terminology and acronyms. The designer isn’t trying to impress you with jargon, they’re just speaking the language of the industry. It is extremely helpful if the client has some idea of what the designer is talking about, as both can communicate more clearly. Here are some frequently used terms in web design.

backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own. On blogs they may be called trackbacks. Backlinks play a huge part in search rankings, as the more sites that link to yours, the more important your site is deemed to be by search engines.

breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs (or the breadcrumb trail) are the small, text-based navigation usually found at the top of the content area but below the main navigation. They are used as an aid in helping users see where they are in a website as they drill down through the pages. For example, on a hardware store site you may see “Home > Products > Lawn & Garden > Fertilizer,” as the user moves from the general to the specific.

domain
The domain is the name that identifies a particular website. These domain names represent IP (internet protocol) addresses, which are individual numbers assigned to every website on the internet to differentiate one from another. These IP addresses are translated into domain names so that humans can more easily find and remember them.

font
A font is the same as a typeface, just like the fonts listed in your word processing software. Fonts are trickier on the web than in print, because individual computers and web browsers will display the same font differently. There are certain fonts that are designated as web-safe as they remain essentially the same across all platforms.

impression
Impressions are the number of times an advertisement on a site has been loaded. Advertisers often pay for ad placement based on the number of impressions that ad will receive. Once a set number of impressions is reached, that ad is no longer displayed, as is the case with Google AdWords.

Before any web design work can begin, there are certain things your designer will need to collect from you. These elements are necessary so that they can do their work properly the first time around and avoid unnecessary rounds of revisions because some crucial piece was withheld. Here are three things you should have ready before setting your web designer loose on your new site:

Logos

If you do not have an established color palette for your corporate communications, your logo will help your designer establish one for your site. It will also help them establish the look and feel of every design element on the site. Just because your designer favors mauve and teal doesn’t mean those colors should show up next to your orange and tan logo.

If you really want to help your web designer, you should be able to provide CMYK and/or RGB color values for the colors used in your logo. This will ensure that all the complementary colors they use will fit precisely with your logo.

Branding Guidelines

Branding guidelines can include how your logo and wordmark appear, how your company name may be used, and what kind of language is used to describe your company. Your web designer should not be left to figure these things out on their own. Ensure a consistent look, feel and tone across all your communications by providing your branding guidelines.

If you don’t have branding guideline documentation, you might ask your web design company for help. If they don’t have someone on staff with such a specialization, they can probably recommend a company who does just that to help you.

Content

Websites are nothing without content. If there is no information to read (or watch or listen to), your site serves no purpose whatsoever. In order for a web designer to build your site, they must have content to start with. This content will help them establish an information architecture and taxonomy, and will also help drive some design decisions.

Additionally, content combined with future content needs will also determine your web design project scope. You may think you have a simple job, but your web designer may be able to identify areas of need and areas where scaling is required to accomplish your business goals. You wouldn’t hand a construction crew copies of the blueprints for a house and expect it to get built without wood, nails and such. Give your designer a good foundation of content from which to start building.

More and more traffic to websites is attributed to mobile devices: iPhones, Android phones, iPads, netbooks and the like. But there’s a vast difference between viewing a website on your computer and viewing that same site on your smartphone–primarily screen size. So do you need a mobile version of your website?

In this mobile age, the safe bet is to have a mobile version of your site. Delivering great content is about meeting your customers where they are, and today’s web users are growing to expect a mobile presence.

Fortunately your web design shop can help you deliver on this expectation. This is especially true if you are using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Drupal. Both these and other CMSs offer plug-ins to translate your site into a mobile browser specific experience with a minimum of work.

If your new site isn’t using a CMS or you are having one custom-developed, you should ask your web designer shop about developing a style sheet (CSS) specifically for mobile devices. Another approach is to develop a separate site just for mobile devices. Google is an excellent example of this practice, with mobile sites for search and Gmail among others.

Mobile sites and mobile-specific CSS work by detecting what browser and device a visitor is using and redirecting them from the normal site to the mobile version. Either method ensures that your site visitors get an experience that’s optimized for the browser and device they are using, and make it easy for them to find what they need.

Any consultant with expertise in search engine optimization (SEO) will tell you that SEO is the most crucial aspect of your website. What good is designing a pretty website if no one can find it via search?

A pure designer, on the other hand, if left to their own devices will create a beautifully artistic online representation of your company that may not have any value for search.

So which is more important? The answer is both.

It is not necessary to sacrifice good aesthetic design to get good search rankings. One way to ensure this is by making sure the web design firm you hire has an SEO expert on staff, or by hiring one externally to work with your designers. Having these two parties work together on your behalf will help you get the most for your web design dollar.

A great resource for making sure your site is SEO friendly is Google Webmaster Tools, a set of tips and tools for your reference when creating your site. It focuses on both technical nuts-and-bolts like page titles, page descriptions, site maps, and code validation as well as content issues like header tags, keyword density, and text- and image-labeling.

It’s not necessary to have a plain-jane website in order to gain search ranking. Today’s designers can make beautiful websites that satisfy SEO standards. Do your homework, work with your designer, and don’t be afraid to bring in an expert.

Redesigning your company’s website may be a good opportunity to reexamine your logo and wordmarks. Your logo may be outdated or out of style, or perhaps you’ve never established an official style guide for your company. Your web designer may be able to help.

If you choose to have your web graphic designer work up a new logo, expect that this work will fall outside the scope of the actual web design project. This portion is commonly known as rebranding, and not only will you have a new logo but a new color palette and branding guidelines.

You may choose to hire a third party to develop your new logo and branding. There are many companies that specialize in this field. If you go this route, you must supply your web design company with all the appropriate information and accompanying files from your logo designer so that it can be incorporated into your new website.

Either way, you will want to be sure to get print-quality (300dpi) files of all logos and wordmarks. These will be used for printing business cards, signage, letterhead and the like. It may be appropriate, if your company is sufficiently large, to provide an area of your website for media professionals that includes downloadable logos for use in print publications about your company.

Your web designer is a great resource for this type of work. They will undoubtedly have the talent in-house, or they can make recommendations for other companies for you to evaluate. Rolling out your new website is a great time to debut your brand new company branding.

When working with a web design company, there will be a great deal of new material incorporated, such as graphical elements, logos, photos and video. Some of these may be generated by the web design firm, some may be purchased from third parties, and some generated by you and your company. So who owns what?

Photographs and Videos

If you purchase stock photos you must make sure you buy royalty-free photos. These are available from a wide variety of sources such as istockphoto.com and shutterstock.com. Royalty free photos are those that you are free to use on your site for commercial purposes, and your company has the right to use them forever. If you hire a photographer for custom work, they may want to charge you for the work and add yearly rights fees. It is preferable to purchase the rights to the photos in perpetuity so you can use them for as long as you wish.

Some photos are available from sites like Flickr and WikiMedia Commons that can be used for non-commercial purposes through a Creative Commons license. This license allows photos to be used for non-commercial purposes, usually with an attribution. While these photos shouldn’t be used for a main website, they can be used on your company’s blog as long as you link to the original source.

Videos are much the same as photographs. Some are available for purchase, some via Creative Commons license, and some may be produced by a videographer you hire. The same conditions outlined above for photos apply for video.

Graphics and Logos

All company logos should be registered trademarks, and thus are owned by your company. Graphics created for your website are slightly different: while your web designer won’t use those same graphics again, they are free to use similar concepts and color schemes in future projects. And of course another company may decide to use your site as inspiration. It is just not possible to prevent someone else from “stealing” your site’s look and feel, as the web is an open environment. Protect yourself by trademarking all logos and wordmarks.

The Portfolio Exception

All material created by third parties may be used in a portfolio as a representative sample of their work. You evaluated your web designer and photographer by looking at their portfolios, so you would expect and hope that the work they do for you is included in future iterations.

Getting a new website off up and running is a marathon, not a sprint. While it may seem to you that it’s “easy” to make a website, there are actually several steps to the process. It behooves you to understand the whole process so that you know what to expect and understand better what your web design company is asking of you.

Once you have chosen your web designer, you can expect a workflow similar to the following:

Discussion of Requirements

This is sometimes referred to as an “intake meeting,” where the web designer will ask you a lot of questions about what you want and need your website to do. This will be more in-depth than the initial gathering of requirements the design shop did during the selection phase, so you will need to be prepared to go over your requirements in greater detail.

Wireframing

A wireframe is the document that lays out the website’s pages and functionality, and can be compared to the site’s skeleton. It includes each type of content page (front page, landing pages, content pages, etc.), and is completely free of design elements. It describes how each page will appear and connect with each other as well as any databases or applications the site may use.

Development

Development is where the site is actually built. The wireframe will be turned into an actual site architecture, and it will be skinned with the approved mock-up design. There may be several stages to the development process, including cross-platform and cross-browser testing. This is the step where you will want to remain hands-off until a “final” site is presented for approval.

Beta Testing

Until your site launches for the world to see, your site is in “beta.” This means the site is undergoing testing of all its functionality and any final design tweaks. There may be several rounds of beta testing to ensure the site functions properly, so be patient and don’t panic if it doesn’t all go right the first time. It’s better to find out now that there are issues than after the site goes live.

Payment

The final part of the process is where you pay your designer and sign off the contract as complete. Whether your web designer is freelance or a larger design shop, your timely payment is crucial.

Small companies may have a small IT staff, maybe even just one person. They may also outsource IT support to a third party. Large companies will usually have an in-house IT department, itself also quite large.

Either way, your web design company will have to work with IT to integrate your new website with your company’s existing systems and infrastructure. IT staff must be brought to the table from the very beginning to work with the designers and identify any trouble spots. They must also be prepared to provide all the necessary access, information and support for the site to be developed.

Hosting

Your beta site (the version that is in the process of being developed) will need to be hosted somewhere, as will the final site. Your company may maintain its own internal web server, or you may be paying for hosting externally. Your web designer will need access to these web servers, and your IT staff should be ready to assist them.

Database Integration

Your site may require integration with databases. For example, if your new site employs a content management system, you have an ecommerce component, or you do any email marketing with a sign-up through the website, your site relies on accessing those databases to do its job. This is another crucial area for a close working relationship between your web design shop and your IT staff. IT acts as the gatekeeper to these databases, and your designer and developer will need to be able to make the site “talk” with the databases.

Security

The security issue relates to the two components described above. Your IT staff works hard to make sure your web server, databases, and internet connection points remain free from hacking and other intrusions. In order to do their work, your web design team will require a fairly high level of access to these servers. This access may require the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or other security protocol. Your IT staff will make sure the web designers are outfitted with the proper access to maintain security.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

Prospective web designers should and undoubtedly will have a portfolio of past work for you to evaluate. The portfolio will probably be very colorful and pretty, and will showcase the snazziest pieces of work that designer or web design company has produced.

Don’t make the mistake of getting distracted like a kitten glimpsing a shiny object: a good portfolio absolutely must demonstrate more than visual flair. Here are three things you should look for when evaluating a design portfolio.

Technical Ability

Web design is more than just making a website aesthetically pleasing. There is a development aspect that is crucial, and it requires a breadth of technical ability. Meeting your site’s and your user’s needs may require applications or plug-ins. There will most likely be database integration needed to serve content and conduct sales. And of course there are always new browser capabilities, ensuring that web designers need to stay current on new technologies.

How does your prospective designer demonstrate technical ability? They should clearly indicate programming and scripting languages used, applications and databases used, and other “under the hood” information. If they do not do so in their portfolio, you need to ask them during the interview.

Marketing Capability

The main point of a website is to provide information. For businesses, that information should lead to sales. Your web design shop should be able to interpret your business goals into solid marketing techniques for your website. This can include visual design elements, integration of social media, video and the like as well as underlying factors like search engine optimization.

All of these and more play a part in the marketing being done by your site. A designer should be able to report gains made in search ranking, increases in online conversions, and other market data to demonstrate their marketing capability.

Experience

This one seems obvious, but a few pretty looking websites does not equal a high level of experience. Your prospective web design company’s portfolio should reflect a wide range of experience with clients of varying sizes. A multi-million dollar company isn’t going to hire a designer who did the website for his mom’s flower shop and calls himself a design firm. Look carefully at the sites in the portfolio: how big are the other client companies? How large are their sites? Are the sites still up, and how are they doing?

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

Now, this could refer to your own IT team working with a web designer, or a design company on their own. But what it boils down to is an effective, efficient design firm will use time-saving tools and solutions to get the job done. They will leverage existing technologies rather than building everything from the ground up.

There are many benefits to utilizing open source or commercial tools in web design. We’ll use the content management system as an example. It’s common for large enterprises to want to build everything themselves, and that feeling is natural: they have the talent and the resources, and they want their own name on their products. This sentiment often goes all the way down to the inner workings of their website.

Plenty of web design and development shops build custom content management systems. Some of them are very good. But they all suffer from the same problem: they’re custom. Want to add a new technical feature to your site? Get out your checkbook, because it’s got to be written for your CMS. Want to make changes to the site template? Start clocking those billable hours.

Think back to the railroad boom in the 19th century. Each rail company used their own gauge of tracks, ensuring that only their trains could run on their rails. If you didn’t own the tracks that went through a particular city, you were either shut out or you had to build your own infrastructure. In the end, the biggest company won because they adopted a standard.

Fast forward to the present: your web design project is akin to building your own railroad. You have the choice of adopting a standard (either an open source or commercial CMS) or building your own rails (building a CMS in-house). You may have your own reasons for wanting a custom CMS, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But a CMS–especially open source–that’s “out of the box” will generally be more extensible via plug-ins and widgets, be cheaper and faster to deploy, support more choices of templates, and won’t require extensive programming to add new features. Even better, by choosing an out-of-the-box solution, the workings of the CMS are standard. So when you add new members to your team who are in charge of making web updates, chances are they won’t require much if any training.

Just because you’re a paying customer doesn’t give you the right to treat your web designer poorly. It is just as incumbent upon you the client to communicate fairly and effectively as it is your designer. There are many unspoken cliches about bad clients among web design circles. Now there are even outlets like webpagesthatsuck.com and clientsfromhell.com to give designers their soapbox.

Don’t end up on one of these sites. Don’t be this person.

Can you give us some spec designs for free?

A web design project isn’t sample day at the grocery store. Spec designs are intended to interpret client needs and desires into the foundation of the final design. They are typically included in the project scope, and should not be expected up front and at no charge.

You should rely on portfolios, interviews, and responses to requests for proposals rather than asking for free work.

My daughter/son knows about computers, and they could do this job cheaper or free.

If your mindset going into a web design project is hiring amateur talent for amateur money, then by all means go for it. Meanwhile your competition will work with professionals who will help them eat your lunch.

A professional web design company has experience in search optimization, information architecture, usability and so on that your high school child lacks. Plus, it’s demeaning to tell someone who probably went to school for a number of years to learn their craft that they’re not worth it.

I’d like to manage every step of the design process.

There is a big difference between attention to detail and micromanaging. Know the difference. You may be asked to evaluate certain elements of your site at various stages of completion, so you should be paying attention to the big picture and focus on exactly what the designer is asking from you.

You may be tempted to throw in new ideas far along in the process, changing the scope of the project. You might want to talk with your web designer at 3:00 am on a Sunday. Don’t and don’t.

One of the main keys to keeping a web design and development project on scope, on time and on budget is communication. From the initial RFP to the site launch and beyond, effective communication between you and your web design company is the straw that stirs the drink.

A good project management tool or suite of tools is an excellent way to ensure a high level of communication. In years past we were tied to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint for email and project communication, a costly endeavor. Now there are many free or low-cost alternatives available to businesses of all sizes.

For example, Google Docs allows a number of users to share and collaborate on word processing documents, spreadsheets, and calendars. Rather than emailing documents back and forth among all the project participants, documents can be edited and shared in real time. This keeps one accurate document–a source of truth–available to all parties, eliminating the risk of having multiple versions of the same document floating around without knowing which is the most current.

Basecamp is a software as a service (SAAS) project management and time tracking tool that allows companies to set up project teams. Similar to Microsoft Project, projects are broken down into Milestones (deliverables) and To Do lists (action items). To Do items and Milestones can be assigned resources (the person or people responsible) and dependent deadlines.

Users can also share all documents–PDFs, images, whatever–with all the other members of the team. Email communication is also handled through the application, rather than through individual users’ email accounts, so all project communication is housed centrally and securely, and can be referenced at any time.

These are just two examples of collaborative project management tools. Your company may have a solution in place, as may your web design firm. You will need to establish what system will be used and who will have access. The simple act of using such tools will help your web design project move along smoothly, and everyone involved will have all the relevant information at their fingertips.

Courtesy Flickr

As much as you can’t paint every person and every project with the same broad brush, there are some common practices in designing a new website that simply need to go because they’re not good. Some of these are firmly entrenched in the way businesses go about projects, so they may be tough to overcome. But you simply must get past them in order for your web design firm to deliver a quality product.

Design by Committee

Many companies will assemble a task force or committee to oversee the development of a new website. The smallest decisions are pored over endlessly by the group, with each person making sure their opinions are represented. Many of these choices should be made before the project even begins. For example, fonts, colors and logo usage should be determined by your corporate style guide. That way, 10 people don’t waste precious time and money debating these details.

In the end, in an effort to please everyone, your site ends up satisfying no one. Keep your web design group to a minimum. This will ensure the project moves along efficiently, and it minimizes the number of points of contact your web design company has to deal with.

Ignoring Your Users

Many times throughout the day we make choices on instinct: we go with our gut. Your website is intended to serve a critical business function: informing your users about your products and services, and ultimately selling to them. Your own personal preferences about certain design elements, content and functionality must be second to the needs and desires of your customers. They, not you, are the target audience for your website, so their behaviors and preferences must be taken into account.

Everything Must be Represented on the Homepage

Visit the home pages of AOL or Yahoo and notice what’s there: everything. Sadly, these sites are better than they used to be. Every department or service line in your company will likely want some of that prime front page real estate. Or maybe you believe every product deserves to be placed there because–of course–everything you make or sell is important.

This is outdated thinking, and it will kill the user experience on your site. Focus instead on highlighting, maybe even on a rotating basis, a few key elements of your company. Make it easy to find products and services in the navigation. Ensure that your search function is robust. You don’t walk into a hardware store and find their entire inventory piled on the floor in front of you. Customers expect content to be organized by section, so rather than creating a giant mess right out of the gate, instead make it easy for them to find what they need within the site.

Micromanaging Your Designer

Your web designer likely has years of experience, and probably went to school for some years to learn their trade. You, on the other hand, are the expert in your business. Your designer should rely on your for your expertise in your field, and you should rely on them for theirs. Hovering over their shoulder nitpicking every step along the web design process will only serve to accomplish two things: both of you will be frustrated, and your site will end up sub-par.

Design is a process of steps. Whether it’s a graphical element or a web application, it takes time and a series of iterations to bring it to completion. Micromanaging your web designer will make this process take longer, because you may be focused on what’s in front of you without knowing what the final result will be (missing the forest for the trees). Lay out your goals clearly in the beginning, and let your web designer wow you with the final product.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

You will likely have a lot of questions for your prospective web designer or web design company. In your eagerness to get your new website off the ground, you may mistake silence for understand. Don’t.

A good designer will have many questions for you as well. We’ve covered a few of them previously, but let’s look at a few more things a designer should ask of you, the client.

What features do you want your website to have?

It’s important to know what functionality you expect from your site before your web design firm begins work. Do you need ecommerce capability? What about a blog? There are myriad features you may want, and some others you may not realize you need. There may be still others your site doesn’t require. By getting a feel for what you expect and what you want your site to do, your web designer can better deliver on those goals.

What are your competitors’ websites?

A critical aspect of website planning is competitive analysis. You may think you have all the right ideas about what your website should be and how it should behave, but you’re probably missing something. Examining the sites of your competition will help weed out the bad ideas, and may give your web designer inspiration to do something better than the other guy or gal.

What websites do you like? Why?

Your company’s website is a reflection on you. You may have built your business from the ground up, and your site should be no different. Your personal preferences help drive business decisions like what clients or vendors you will work with, what products you will or will not carry, and so on. Your taste in websites can help your web designer realize your vision.

What is the deadline and budget?

Leaving a design project open-ended with regard to time and money is a costly mistake.  You may have business goals that depend on your new site, such as launching a new product or service, or an accompanying advertising campaign with which your new website should be coordinated. Establishing timelines and budget help keep your web design project on track, and prevent cost overruns.

Your new website is much more than just the pretty interface users see when they visit it. There is a whole underlying layer that determines how the site operates, its capabilities and functionality: platform.

When you or your web design company set up hosting for your new site, you will have the option for either Microsoft or Linux/LAMP hosting. It’s important for all parties involved to understand the differences between the two, as this decision will affect many other choices down the line in terms of what your site can do and how it will be built.

Some web designers have more experience, are more comfortable, or have more resources in place to develop a site on one platform or the other. You need to be sure the designer you select has expertise in this area, and doesn’t try to sway you into adopting one platform or the other just because that’s what they like. The platform you choose must above all meet the needs of you and your customers.

It’s crucial to note that Microsoft hosting does not mean your site will work better in Windows. Microsoft and Linux hosting refer to the back-end technology that runs your site, and determine factors like what types of database interactions are at your designer’s and developer’s disposal.

Microsoft

Microsoft hosting servers are a closed ecosystem, meaning that you have fewer options for components like content management systems and databases. In terms of programming, Microsoft hosting depends on ASP.NET, a proprietary programming language. The costs for Microsoft hosting are higher, but developers can depend on frequent updates and patches from Microsoft.

If your company already uses Microsoft tools like Exchange and Sharepoint, Microsoft hosting may be a good solution for you. These tools are all integrated and talk with each other easily. Implementing each solution is aided by the availability of certified Microsoft developers and systems engineers.

Linux/LAMP

Linux is open-source, meaning anyone can develop code for it. Hosting your site on a Linux platform actually means that it will run on what is called a LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Linux is the hosting environment where the website lives, Apache is the web server that runs the web traffic to and from your site, MySQL is the type of database that runs applications, and PHP is the programming back-end of the website itself. Your web design company will know what this all means, and will tell you if they have the designers and developers in place to work within this system.

One of LAMP’s advantages is that, since it is open source, the software is all free. It is also supported by a huge community of independent developers all working to make the software and systems better. Popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal run on a LAMP stack.

Do Your Research

Work with your web design firm to figure out which solution is best for you. Talk with other companies and find out what their experiences are. In all, don’t get railroaded into one solution or the other because that’s what a designer and developer want.

Magician courtesy WikiMedia Commons

The insider world of web design is a bit like magic: a magician never gives away their secrets. While you don’t need or necessarily want to understand everything that happens behind the curtain, you don’t need to be completely in the dark when dealing with a designer.

The Customer Is Not Always Right

Web designers have years of expertise (or at least they should) that informs their decision making and recommendations to their clients. In order to keep your business, some designers will happily go along with any requests their clients may make. Behind closed doors they will shake their heads in dismay at the outlandish and nonsensical demands made by clients. You are the experts in your field, and your designer should treat you as such. Do them the courtesy of respecting their expertise in theirs.

You Don’t Need to Pay for Small Ongoing Changes

Websites used to be built in static HTML, the standard web programming and scripting language. Any change required knowledge of the back end of the site to execute. Now sites are commonly built utilizing a content management system (CMS), which separates the physical design from the content (the words) itself. It is considerably more cost efficient to have a web design firm build a site in a CMS, and then make ongoing updates and changes internally. Any designer that tells you otherwise is milking you for your money.

Design Does Not Equate to Search Engine Optimization

As the old saying goes, beauty is only skin deep. The outward appearance of a website does not determine its effectiveness in terms of search ranking. The two factors that most heavily weigh into search engine optimization (SEO) are information architecture and content. Fancy tailpipes don’t make a car go faster, more horsepower does. Make sure your web design company is skilled in information architecture, or find someone who is. And if you don’t have internal resources to deal with content development, hire a company that can.

Being aware of what your competition is up to is a crucial component of understanding your own path forward. Fortunately in the web world you can gain critical insights into the success and failures of your competition without Cold War-style spy games.

Before beginning your web project with your web designer, you should ask if they do any kind of competitive analysis. Sometimes this may take the form of taking a simple inventory of the elements of competitors’ websites to see what you like and what you don’t like, both in terms of content and design. Some of the best ideas are those inspired by the actions of others. On the other hand, your competition may provide you with examples of what not to do.

Your web design firm should be able to make recommendations based on competitors’ sites. What in your mind seems like a good idea may actually be a failing on their part in terms of information architecture, aesthetic design, search engine optimization, and the like. A good designer will be able to provide keen insights into what works and what doesn’t, and performing a competitive analysis will help them understand your market and your customers better.

Your designer may even dig deeper and utilize tools like Compete or Quantcast to get more specific data on a site’s user base and habits. These tools give you a peek into the analytics of a website based on anonymous user data. You may discover an entirely new market segment or target demographic you didn’t know existed for your products, and that your competition may be ignoring.

In any case, make sure you inquire about a competitive analysis with your designer or firm. It doesn’t have to take weeks, and can help you and your designer deliver exactly the site you and your customers need.

Putting down on paper how a product is to be used before that product is built is a crucial, understood component of product design. A construction company uses blueprints before starting a house. A car company goes through many iterations of plans before making a single weld.

So why should a website be any different? Just because it’s not a physical, three-dimensional product does not mean its usability and usefulness is of any less importance.

A web design company should either be able to help you engage in usability testing or find someone to help you do so. They should then be responsive to the findings presented in the usability report. Time and budget should be built into the project scope to account for any additional work that needs to be done pending these tests.

In addition to personas, there are two basic types of usability documents your web design company should prepare: usability test plans and usability reports.

Usability Test Plans

Test plans consist of three main components: the purpose of the test, logistics and methodology, and script. Obviously the more complex the usability tests, the more complex the accompanying documentation will be. But these three are the main points this document will need to cover.

The purpose of the test may seem obvious: to determine if the website is easy to use. This would be like saying “The purpose of a house is for living in.” You need to be able to answer questions like “To determine if site visitors looking for a particular product are happy with the ease with which they were able to find that product’s information and complete their purchase.”

Logistics and methodology refer to how the tests will be conducted. Will you give each test subject a piece of paper with the description of a goal, let them step through the process, and then interview them afterwards? Or will you be doing more in-depth research that utilizes eye-tracking and heat maps?

The script outlines exactly how you will present information and scenarios to test subjects. Each subject should be presented the same information in the same way to eliminate bias. That way the outcomes demonstrated by the subjects are a result of each individual’s experience and comfort with the site combined with their own intuition and pre-existing knowledge.

Usability Reports

Usability reports sum up the experiences of the test subjects into a document that can be used to tweak the website moving forward. Expected and actual behaviors and outcomes should be compared. User sentiment should be included to get an idea for how subjects felt about their experience.

Usability Mine courtesy WikiMedia Commons

Often times web designers are just that: designers. They may have some kind of arts degree mixed with a computer specialization, usually involving illustration and design. While their aesthetics may be a matter of taste, their talent and abilities are unquestionable.

But when it comes to creating a website, you need more than just aesthetics. Your website must be intuitive and useful for your visitors. This is especially true when creating a complicated site, such as one for ecommerce or an intranet site with access to a multitude of applications.

Without taking usability into account, you may end up with a site that looks very pretty but makes it difficult for users to accomplish what they need to do–or what you want them to do.

Imagine visiting a hospital: these facilities are full of signs, often color-coded, directing patients and visitors where they need to go. Often when visiting a hospital you receive a map with the same color codes for each department. You might even visit the information or concierge desk to ask for specific directions.

Now take all of that away. The doctors and nurses know what to do, because they work there, each in their respective specialty areas. But you’re going to visit your grandmother who had hip surgery. Do you need geriatrics? Orthopedics? Outpatient physical therapy? Where to go?

Your website is like the hospital, and each of your company’s departments is akin to these hospital areas. Your employees know what to do and where to go. But visitors do not. They only know what they want to do, and shouldn’t have to be familiar with the inner workings of your company to get what they need.

When working with a web design firm, or when soliciting bids, it is crucial to ask about their experience and expertise with usability. Do they have someone in-house who specializes in information architecture and usability? Do they partner with a company who fulfills that need? How do they plan to address this concept?

If their answers don’t satisfy you, it may be time to look elsewhere. If they’re open to partnering, try finding a group with a speciality in usability. You will find that your conversions increase just by the mere act of building your website properly the first time, so that your customers can easily get what they need.

Hierarchy of Needs courtesy WikiMedia Commons

You know exactly what your website needs to do: drive traffic and deliver customers. Your web designer knows what your website needs to do: look nice and load quickly. But what about your site visitors? What do they expect from your site?

Before a single wireframe is developed, line of code written, or fancy graphic made, you must understand who your users actually are. This understanding should go beyond top-level demographic data like age, income, race and marital status. How long has your primary demographic been married? Do they like gadgets? Do they have an old beater car or are they always getting something new? How do they use the internet and what for?

This information and more needs to be discovered and documented. The best way to keep your users’ needs in mind is by turning this information into personas: an embodiment of each target demographic with detailed information about their lives, created from an amalgamation of user data.

Persona development began in the world of marketing as a way of describing what customers companies were trying to reach. In recent years as the web has grown to be recognized as a marketing tool, personas have grown in popularity when building websites. Well thought-out personas ensure that no one on the team says “I think our users want this.” Instead, with multidimensional portraits of your targeted users, you can say “Bob wants this, but Suzy expects that.”

While there is no standard for persona development, you can expect certain common elements:

• Demographic information
• Technology comfort level
• Personal background
• Motivations
• Features desired
• Behaviors

These will come as a result of market research, user testing, and solid analysis of your site analytics. They are written up in biographical format, usually by someone fairly creative.

The first three serve to introduce your customers and establish who they are. The second three answer the question “What do our customers currently think and do, and what do we want them to think and do?”

Persona development can be bare-bones and come strictly from analytics and a keen amount of insight and creativity, or it can result from hundreds of hours or market research. Or it can be anywhere in between. The level of analysis and work put into persona development will be determined by the resources you have at hand.

The important thing is to ask your prospective web design company is whether they develop personas, or if they have experience working with them. If they come back with blank stares, they are not worth their salt. An experienced, effective designer would ideally suggest persona development to you, the client. A good designer will work with personas. One who won’t shouldn’t be hired in the first place.

Geocities

Previously we discussed a small sampling of ways to tell when you need a new website. This smattering in no way covers it, so here are some more indicators that your website is in need of serious help.

Does your site use a content management system?

In the good old days, websites were built in straight HTML using an editor like Dreamweaver or (shudder to think) Frontpage. This meant that websites didn’t necessarily adhere to any standards whatsoever. It also meant that any updates had to be done by hand and the new HTML files uploaded to the web server, increasing the likelihood that things could break or otherwise go wrong.

Modern websites are usually built in a content management system (CMS). Paid, free, or open source, a CMS ensures that all pages adhere to design and web standards. Additionally, many users within an organization can be given access to certain parts of the content so they can easily make updates.

If your site isn’t built on a CMS in 2010, the time has come to redevelop your site.

Does your site take too long to load?

The reach of broadband access has ensured that most people have some type of high speed access to the internet. People are impatient, and have come to expect websites to load nearly instantaneously. If they are forced to wait for 10 seconds (or even less) they will usually move on to the next site.

A site that takes too long to load can be symptomatic of incorrectly formatted or scaled images, overuse of Flash or other proprietary plugins, too many calls to a database, or something else. Regardless, modern design standards and techniques help ensure that sites load quickly. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, it is past time to blow it up and start over.

Do you still have a hit counter, blinking text, background music, or other outdated elements on the site?

Back when anyone could build and host a free website on Geocities, Compuserve and the like, the web was like the wild west: anything went in terms of design. The technology was so new, we were all just figuring it out.

Companies like Geocities popularized atrocious elements like blinking text, background music and such (remember the dancing hamsters?). And hit counters? Welcome to 1996, before we had powerful free tools like Google Analytics. If your site still includes features like these, you are probably the laughing stock of everyone who visits it.

Quantcast

You and your company know your customers. You know who you’re trying to reach. But who’s reaching you?

Most people who deal with creating and maintaining websites know about and are using tools like Google Analytics to determine site traffic and such. But there are other tools, both free and paid, that help you see who’s visiting your site.

Knowing as much demographic information as possible about your site visitors will not only help you work with a web designer on your new site, but it can also illuminate demographics you didn’t know you had.

Compete

You’re already utilizing Google Analytics or some other analytics tool to examine your own site traffic. That’s fantastic. But did you know you can look at similar information for competitors’ websites?

Compete provides free and paid tools to help you compare site traffic data, search analysis and other helpful information between different websites. That way you can compare your site to your competing company’s site in the next state and see who’s doing what. This information can give you and your design firm critical insights about what your new site needs to do–or do better.

Quantcast

Quantcast takes some of the guesswork out of site analytics by breaking down your visitor and search trends into terminology anyone can understand.

Did you realize that 30% of the visitors to your site are Latino males age 18-34 with two or more children? Quantcast can tell you, and this can help drive decision making when designing and building your new site.

Both of these sites in conjunction can help expose new business opportunities while helping your understand who your users really are and what your competition is up to. A good web design shop will present this type of information to you. If you really want to get a leg up on the process, come to the meeting with your homework in hand and show them this data. Not only will they like you, but it will make the whole web redesign project easier.

There are many, many factors that may indicate your current website is in need of a redesign. Most of these will be brought to your attention if you ask any web design company, as of course that’s their job.

But there are some simple tests you can perform on your own to help determine your site’s need for a refresh. Here are a few:

Do you make excuses for your website?

When showing your website to other people, be they family and friends or potential clients or customers, do you say things like “Sorry, this doesn’t act like it should,” or “Yeah, I know this is bad, but it works.”

You should never have to say these things to anybody. Ever. If you find yourself making excuses or glossing over important parts of the site, it’s time to start over.

Do you receive calls from customers having trouble?

Your most important audience for your site is customers, either current or potential. Unless your primary goal is to have people call you for information, these users shouldn’t have to pick up the phone.

Your site must be intuitive and easy to use. If you are receiving calls from customers having trouble doing what they need to do on your website, or if they can’t locate crucial pieces of information, this is an indicator that your website needs help.

How does your site look in different browsers on different computers?

Modern web design and development standards help ensure a consistent user experience regardless of what computer or browser someone is using. Site visitors should not be compelled or asked to view your site in a certain browser in order for it to function properly.

Just because your site looks good on the computer at your desk doesn’t mean it works the same for everyone. Check your site on your neighbor’s computer or a computer at the library. If it isn’t up to snuff, it’s time for a redesign.

Do you use a certain set of colors for your signage? Do they match your business cards, brochures, and other collateral material? Do you have uniforms or polo shirts with those colors and your logo?

Guess what: those are corporate style guidelines.

Your website should reflect your company’s established style and tone. If left to their own devices, a web designer may come up with a design that, while very creative, may not fit with your identity.

Before hiring a web designer, it is highly recommended that you formalize this identity into some sort of corporate style guideline document. This document should include at least proper logo usage, colors, and typefaces/fonts.

Taking the time to prepare this document will help your designer build a website that reflects your vision for your company, not just their own. Some design firms may be able to assist you with this document as part of the project planning process. Even if you don’t have the resources to hire a marketing firm to draft this document for you, just putting these standards down on paper in whatever format you choose will provide a great foundation for your new website.

There are three critical factors to consider in a site audit:

Sitemap

Build an outline in a spreadsheet of your site as it currently exists. This outline should consist of the page title, URL, keywords and resources (such as PDFs, audio/video, etc.). By constructing a sitemap of your existing site, you will be able to more easily identify areas that need work, content holes, and areas that should be eliminated.

Keywords

Do the pages in your existing site include relevant keywords? If not, the content itself is in need of an overhaul. Think of keywords as the terms people would enter into a search engine for which you would like your site to be found. Those phrases should appear frequently (two to three times per page) throughout your site, on pages that are relevant to that topic. These keywords establish relevancy, a key factor in search engine optimization.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Setting up the domain for your website is a great start, but everything that follows it is just as important. The name that appears in the location bar of the browser helps search engines understand the content of the page itself, so the URL should be descriptive. Think of it this way … which URL is easier for YOU to understand: “www.yourdomain.com/5982u9234982fujhfei.content.4343.php” or “www.yourdomain.com/new-products”? All page titles and URLs should be readable by search engines (and humans).

Wrong.

User Testing Group

Until you’ve gotten input and feedback from the people who will visit your site–the users–you’re not completely ready to go.

Large enterprises will often hire web consulting firms to conduct extensive user testing at various points in the design process. Larger web design firms may employ their own in-house staff to conduct user testing. Smaller businesses can still complete this crucial step before launching their websites without paying an arm and a leg.

You’ve been working on your website with your designer from the very beginning, so you may not see the forest for the trees. You know what your site is supposed to do, so you will probably have a different experience from someone who hasn’t seen the site before.

Believe it or not, you can get adequate user feedback without expensive eye tracking, heat mapping, and other tools of the trade. It may come down to simply assembling a group of your primary users and customers for an hour. You can even involve your friends and family to get a decent sampling of user feedback.

Small User Group

Identify a set of about 10 or 12 customers with whom you have a good working relationship. Offer them a small gift or reward such as gift certificates, vouchers or even cash in exchange for their time. Get these users together in a room and give them access to your new website and ask them to complete a certain set of tasks such as building a shopping cart/list, filling out a profile, and making a purchase.

Time how long these tasks take, and take note of any questions, concerns and comments that arise. You and your web designer can then use this feedback to make improvements or changes to your site so that your customers are given the easiest, most straightforward experience once your site launches.

Friends and Family

Any and all user feedback is valuable. Think of involving your friends and family–the “Mom” test–in evaluating your site. Ask them to complete tasks like those outlined above, and make note of their responses.

While this isn’t the highly scientific (and expensive) method of user testing, it will still give you valuable insight into how people use your site.

Here are some additional entries in the list of acronyms commonly used by web designers and developers. See part one for the rest of the list.

CRAP: Contrast Repetition Alignment and Proximity. What started as an inside joke is now a recognized design principle. It refers to various methods of organizing design elements and content so that it makes sense to the viewer, and each element provides visual cues as to its purpose and importance.

DOM: Document Object Model. DOM is a specification for a programming interface (API) that allows programs and scripts to update the content, structure and style of HTML and XML documents. Basically speaking, it makes any document look like a database.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. This is a protocol that allows users to copy files between their local system and any system on the network, such as a web server.

IP: Internet Protocol. IP is the basic standard of communication and addressing for the internet. It labels individual packets or pieces of data with both the sending and receiving computers’ addresses.

LAMP: Linux Apache MySQL PHP. LAMP is a solution for free, open source software components used to build a web server. While designed independently, over the years they have been developed to serve as a reliable, stable web hosting environment.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of designing a site so that search engines easily find the pages and index them. It involves keywords used in the text and the placement of those words on the page.

SSL: Secure Sockets Layer. SSL is a protocol designed to provide secure communication over the internet using encryption. For instance, the web address for your bank when you log in may be HTTPS, indicating that it is using SSL for security.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is an identifier that specifies where a resource is available and how to retrieve it.  It is commonly known as the address of a website, such as amazon.com.

Ultimately, that decision is yours. You should focus instead on the advantages and disadvantages of each, as well as what your web development needs are, in evaluating what kind of hosting you get.

Windows Hosting

Windows hosting means that your website lives on a Windows server environment. Windows servers and applications are more expensive than Linux (a free, open source software) hosting, meaning that hosting in this environment will usually be more expensive.

Windows servers are more prone to hacking due to the sheer volume of attacks on Windows software. Microsoft releases frequent security patches, but if these patches are not applied immediately the server on which your website resides may be vulnerable.

However, if you are a small shop and it will be up to you to manage your hosting, Windows hosting will feel very familiar and easy. You may also find it easier to manage associated databases such as MySQL.

Linux Hosting

Linux is the name of an operating system based on Unix. The OS software is free and open source, so it is developed and supported by a large international developer community.

Since it is free from the licenses required by Microsoft Windows, Linux hosting is usually cheaper. Most content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress and Drupal are made to run in a Linux hosted environment, increasing your options for building your website.

Linux does have a higher learning curve than Windows, so a greater degree of specialized knowledge is often required.

Databases and Languages

A CMS like Drupal or WordPress utilizes plugins to achieve functionality. These plugins may require the availability of a scripting language like PHP and access to a database such as MySQL. You will want to be sure that your host provides solutions that give access to these basic requirements.

Website Wireframe

One word you will hear early in the web design process is “wireframing.” This may be new vocabulary to you, but it’s old hat to web designers.

Wireframing is akin to framing a house: it is the basic outline and structure of the finished product. It includes almost no visual design elements and no real functionality. It is simply a visual representation to suggest the structure of a website and the relationship between its pages.

It may be useful to think of a wireframe like the outline of a document. Before writing a complex document such as book or long research article, you learned in school to outline the main points of what you want to say. Section one includes such-and-such, here are the supporting points, and so on.

A wireframe can start as the proverbial drawing on a bar napkin and go from there. Often the process will move from paper to a whiteboard to a wireframing software tool. It will include almost no real content, often just faux-Latin placeholder text. Instead, it will visually place all the elements of a site on each type of page including areas for introductory text, tag lines, calls to action, navigational elements, and more.

Developing a wireframe is crucial to getting a web design project off to a good start. The wireframe will serve as your road map, keeping you and your designer on track as design moves forward. Websites can become very complex, and having a simple document to which you can refer back is a great way to prevent scope creep–making more and more changes, adding more and more features to a design or project until it careens out of control.

The wireframe at its most basic level keeps the end result in mind: the user experience. The wireframe will force you and your designer to ask: Is this feature necessary? How does it relate to the rest of the site?

In the end, you’ll save hassle and money by outlining your web design project from the start.

Choosing a web host should be be one of the easiest parts of building your website. Most web design firms can make hosting recommendations based on your individual needs, so you should wait to purchase hosting until your project is fully scoped.

Web hosts can provide many features beyond just a place to put your website. Among the services that web hosting services can offer are:

• Domain registration
• database hosting
• email hosting
• social media tools
• analytics tools, and
• text messaging.

It is important to work with you web design company or your development team to be absolutely sure that your project needs are met.

During your search, be sure to research the host’s reputation via Twitter, Google, and technology review sites. It is important to choose a host with uptime guarantees, as well as a documented and reliable support infrastructure.

Many web hosting providers now utilize tools such as a blog or Twitter account to provide status updates, as well as SMS messages or email.

Will you handle search optimization and marketing?

The goal of having a website is to attract visitors. Whatever your conversion strategy is–whether it’s increased sales, increased awareness, customer preference, whatever–your site must attract visitors. A primary means of attracting these visitors is via organic search.

Organic search is exactly like it sounds. Your business sells garden hoses, so you want people who search for “garden hose” in a search engine to find your website. Everything about the site from the information architecture, navigation and content must be optimized to bring garden hose buyers to your site as often as possible.

A web shop may have a search optimization expert in-house, or they may partner with a company dedicated to search. Either way, the act of building a website does not necessarily include the search component. You need to find out if your prospective designer will engage in search optimization.

You may wish to move beyond organic search into paid search. An example of paid search is Google AdWords. When a user enters “garden hose” into Google, the paid search results appear under the “Sponsored Links” section. Again, whether in-house or partnered, a web design shop may or may not offer this aspect of service.

If a design shop does not offer organic and paid search services, ask if they can recommend a firm that specializes in search.

Do you handle application development in-house?

Some design shops are simply that: designers. They can architect and build beautiful websites, but if your business requires anything more extensive–such as ecommerce–you will also need development work.

A web design firm that has application developers in-house will be best suited to your needs. If a design shop has to outsource custom development work, it can drive up the price of your website as each party involved must get their cut of the money. Find out up front if they provide development work in-house.

What are real-world examples of your firm’s success in solving business problems?

The main purpose of a website is to solve a business problem or set of problems. You may need to increase sales, increase awareness, or influence perception. All of these are business problems.

Ask your prospective designer for examples of how they’ve solved problems for previous clients. They should be able to provide you with concrete examples including ROI numbers where available. If a design shop can’t provide these examples, move on. They’re not going to help you and you’ll be back where you started in no time.

When someone sends you an email, your name server knows. The message is received and routed to your mail server by following the MX record configuration. MX records are very important, and you should edit them with care.

Most MX records are established in a set, with different preferences for mail delivery across multiple servers. This technique is applied to provide preference to a main mail server, as well as backups and load balancing for peak times.

When editing MX records, it is important to have detailed documentation from your web host, email provider, or technical lead. Misconfiguring MX records can result in mail not being delivered, and/or email not being available for your entire organization.

Do what now?

There is a vast difference between web design and web development. Understanding this difference is a matter of asking yourself one question:

Would you rather put a picture of a chair in your living room, or have a real chair to sit in?

Unless you’re a fan of spending money on useless or non-functional goods, you’d clearly rather sit in an actual chair. This is the difference between design and development.

Design is the act of planning and fashioning artistically. Design prepares a preliminary sketch of the form and function of something. In the web world, design implies just the “pretty parts” of a website: how a site looks and feels.

Development, on the other hand, is making that design functional. An artist may be able to create a painting of a car, but couldn’t change a car’s oil. A developer will work within the design framework of a website and actually create the functional elements–such as an online shopping cart, calendar or messaging system.

When evaluating a web design company, it is important to note this difference and find out if they have the developers on staff to accomplish your business goals.

An attractively designed website that appeals to aesthetic sensibilities is great. A functional website that helps you sell your product is better.

Questions Answered Here

Your web design firm should come into the evaluation process armed with questions of their own. Just as you are the expert in your business, they should be the experts in theirs. To truly deliver on client needs and expectations, a designer must ask questions to help them develop a website the right way, the first time.

Here are some questions you should expect to hear from a web design company. If you don’t hear some or any of these, you should probably look at someone else to build and maintain your site.

What is your primary goal?

A good web designer helps you solve a problem. By asking you to identify the overarching goal of the website, they can better help you solve that problem.

How will success be measured?

Your primary goal will determine how success will be evaluated. It may be increased online sales over the previous year, increased search ranking, or some other metric. But in order for you and the designer to be considered successful, there must be some way to measure that success.

Who is your target audience?

Different demographics have different expectations and comfort levels with the web. Understanding the people you are trying to reach will go a long way toward determining the type of website you build. If your primary target is women over age 50, for example, you won’t want a website with 10-point font and lots of flashy animation.

What are the benefits of your product or service?

Building a website is more than just graphic design: it’s about marketing. Understanding why your company considers itself to be the best at what it does will help a web designer deliver a site that communicates these benefits. After all, you can’t really be effective at selling something you don’t believe in, and whether it’s ideas or physical products a design shop is helping you sell.

Without documentation, your project is at risk of your designer misunderstanding your direction, and your budget being spent on an unsatisfactory product.

Here is a list of things to be sure to document:

Web hosting requirements

Be sure to document everything you need, as this will connect affect your ongoing budget. Questions to ask include:

• “What platform will the server need to use?”
• “Is a database necessary?”
• “Will we need email hosting for is project?”
• “What programming language will the website require?”

Your web design company will likely have additional requirements.

Project milestones

Determine any dates ahead of schedule, and re-evaluate if things are ahead or behind. This will help keep thugs moving and reduce unnecessary deadline crunches.

Design and wireframes

Request wireframes bfore design begins. This will help prevent or reduce any re-design costs.

Responsibilities and legal

Document what parties are responsible for maintaining hosting, domain, registration, and site maintenance.

Who is called if the site goes down, or if the site needs updates? What are the expectations for update turn around times?

There are many different ways to set up name servers for your website, and many different terms that may need some explanation. These three terms pop up often – be sure to be familiar.

A-NAME – This is your website’s address record. An A-NAME is where the IP address of your main server is set, as well any other sub domains that need to point to other servers via IP address.

C-NAME – Similar to an A-NAME, a C-NAME points to a different server and redirects to the new location.

Sub-Domain – A sub domain is a domain that uses a prefix before your registered domain (sub.domain.com). These domains can sometimes be used to point your domain to another part of your website, or another server all together.

Using A-NAME, C-NAME, and sub-domains can be a very effective way to implement new software, test new builds of your website, or direct web traffic to other locations. It is recommended that you follow any available documentation, or contact the technical lead on your project before adjusting existing name server settings.

Your web designer and/or developer will throw around a lot of acronyms. One of the most important is DNS. DNS, or “domain name system” is a fundamental part of the internet, hence an important part of any web site project.

The simplest way to understand DNS is to think of a mid century office switchboard. At the center of the office building is a room full of operators. When a call comes in, the operator uses a switchboard to route the call to the correct phone in the office of the other party.

If the other party were to move to another office, perhaps on another floor, the operator and switchboard would be need to be updated so that new calls would be routed correctly.

DNS operates very similarly. Once a domain is registered, the owner must point the record to a DNS server. Much like the operator and switchboard, the owner of the domain must configure the name server to point internet traffic to the correct servers, much like phone calls to an office.

Common destinations include MX records for email delivery, A-NAME records for www and the main domain, and can include C-NAME records for address such as mail.domain.com and other URLs.

If a server needs to be moved or replaced, the name server must be updated to direct traffic to the new location, or else traffic will result in an error.

Launching your website will require updating these DNS entries with your web host, whether you host your site yourself or have outside hosting.

What business problem or problems should the site solve?

Once your new site is in motion and you want to make updates and changes, the very first step should always be to ask one question:

What business problem or problems should the changes solve?

Are you noticing a theme here? The key to developing a site and being able to communicate your vision to a designer is to begin with the end in mind. Whether your site is for a one-person shop or a large enterprise, keeping this simple goal in mind will focus the conversation so that you end up getting the site you need.

All the web 2.0 bells and whistles you can throw into a website don’t mean anything if they don’t meet your business goals. Your designer will be able to make clear recommendations and you will get your money’s worth by focusing on what you want to accomplish rather than what you want the site itself to do.

So begin with the end in mind and you’ll solve problems rather than create more.

Don’t take it personally: it’s just the world they inhabit. Art critics make the rest of us feel dumb when we look at a painting and think it’s just a bunch of circles on a canvas. Physicists at NASA won’t even talk to us because there’s no point.

But we need websites, and we need people to make them for us, so we have to work with designers and developers. Here are some of the more common acronyms and terms you’ll hear along with simple explanations for what they mean. You can (and probably should) do further reading on these topics if you are the person in charge of working with a designer or design firm, but this list will give you a head start.

ASP: Active Server Pages. ASP is a server-side scripting language used to add logic and database interactivity to websites.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface. CGI is a protocol that allows server applications to interact with web browsers.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a language used to define how a web page written in HTML or XHTML is presented and displayed in a web browser.

DHTML: Dynamic HyperText Markup Language. DHTML is the term for web sites that are made interactive or animated with HTML, CSS and JavaScript

DNS: Domain Name System. DNS is the internet’s phone book. It translates human language domains/URLs (amazon.com, for instance) into the numeric internet protocol (IP) addresses used by networking equipment and web servers.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the basic language of the entire internet. Every website uses some form of HTML.

JSP: Java Server Pages. Software maker Java’s version of ASP and PHP.

PHP: Personal Home Page. PHP is a server-side scripting language used to add logic and database interactivity to websites.

RoR: Ruby on Rails. RoR is a web application based on the Ruby language. It is popular for use in Web 2.0 sites like Twitter.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication. RSS is an XML specification for publishing frequently updated web content to subscribers. Blogging is a prime example of content that is published via RSS.

Not every website is required to adhere to the standards set forth by the Americans with Disabilities Act. However it is in the nature of the internet that sites should be accessible to as many people as possible, so even if not legally required to do so it is advisable to either make your site ADA compliant or offer a version that is.

All Federal agencies are required to adhere to the Section 508 Standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body for internet standards and protocols, also maintains a set of guidelines called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Private business are exempt from these regulations. Participation in ADA site compliance is strictly voluntary, but it’s just plain good business and a matter of civil rights. You wouldn’t think to bar entry to your store because someone is blind or in a wheelchair, but you might overlook making your website available to those same people.

It’s not as difficult as one may think. The W3C offers a wealth of resources to help web designers make sure their sites are accessible, including checklists and automatic HTML validators. They also have templates for evaluation reports so that your site’s accessibility is thoroughly and properly documents.

So there’s really no excuse: make sure your web designer can (and does) make your site accessible to people with disabilities.

A content management system isn’t just for the benefit of those creating and editing content. A CMS should make it easier and quicker for an IT and/or web team to manage the website.

Web standards change, browsers are updated, and all sorts of changes take place that can quickly make a CMS obsolete unless it is built to keep up with the rapid evolution of the web. Some technical requirements to look for to ensure your CMS will be able to handle anything that comes its way include:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

The content editors and creators should not have to–nor should they have the ability to–change basic elements of the site. These elements include fonts, sizes, colors, etc. A CSS-dependent CMS will ensure that your website maintains established brand and web standards.

Templates

Every type of page on your website should have a corresponding template that determines how that page will render (look). Some basic types of pages are the front page, landing or section pages, and interior or content pages. Depending on your needs, you might have more types (such as product pages). Templates make it easy to create new content: once it is determined what kind of page is needed, the creator simply picks the proper page template.

Multiple formats

your website may be viewed on a computer, a smartphone, or even have pages printed out for later viewing. Your CMS should support stylesheets for all of these formats so that your site will always be viewable regardless of the format or device.

A CMS has two main groups of people it must answer to: IT and authors/content creators. It can be difficult to strike a balance between the needs of these two groups. By examining the feature and capability requirements of each and using those as guidelines for choosing your CMS, you can hopefully satisfy both sides.

For this portion, we’ll focus on the content creation part of the equation. Content creation (and editing) is the function of most concern to the users who will write and edit what is on your website. A basic checklist of functions would include:

Simple authoring environment

Users must be able to log in to the “back end” of the website and easily do their work. They must be able to add and edit text, embed images and video, and the like without using special software or even knowing HTML.

Support for multiple users

More than likely you will have a number of people who work on your website. Each department may have control over what their portion of the website includes. You will also have administrators responsible for approving content and making broader changes.

Versioning

Content will be edited many times. Versioning (or version control) keeps prior copies of the content in the event that a mistake is made, a page is accidentally deleted or what-have-you. A piece of content may be rolled back to or restored from its previous version with ease.

In part 3 we will look at some of the more technical requirements of a CMS.

Why is this crucial? While you want to make sure your needs are addressed, you also want to maintain a good relationship with your designer. This means being a good client, and treating your vendor as you would want to be treated: the good old Golden Rule. This is especially true if you are hiring a freelance worker, who is usually juggling your project with many others.

Additionally, you want to get the most out of your designer you can. This means doing a little homework and understanding what is involved with developing a new site. You need to ask pointed questions that are within the scope of work, not issue overgeneralized platitudes about what you want.

Can you do my site on trade?

First of all, if you’re working with an established design firm, this question will get you laughed out of the room. If you’re looking to hire a freelance designer, while it may be true that they want to fill out their portfolio, they still have a business to run and need to be paid for their work. In either case, while you may have some great services to offer in lieu of cash, those services don’t pay the designer’s bills.

Agree on a price up front, including both an hourly rate and an overall project quote. Don’t get locked into a freewheeling cost estimate, as prices will invariably overrun that estimate. But don’t expect to get quality work for free.

Can you invoice us after the work is finished?

This is another question designers get a lot, and they don’t want to hear it. You wouldn’t expect to go to the grocery and only pay after you’ve eaten the food. Whether a sole proprietor, a small shop or a big firm, the designer has bills to pay. This is especially true if your site requires any outsourced application development. Expect to pay at least half up front to guarantee the work.

Can you work up a site on spec?

Working up a demo site is not the same as a mockup. Mockups involve wireframes to demonstrate architecture and functionality, and images to demonstrate look and feel. Working up a site on spec is basically designing the whole site, and asking for this relates to the previous question. A designer owes you mockups before the job is started and invoicing begins, but they don’t owe you the work in its entirety.

Can you get us on top of Google?

While there is a great deal of search engine optimization involved with proper site design, this element alone will not guarantee improved search results. True search engine optimization (SEO) includes not only the information architecture (IA), content and tags, but also factors in relevance, link building, freshness, and more.

In addition, a designer is not a writer. The content on your site must be optimized so that the key terms you want to “own” in search appear frequently and prominently, and must be organized in a way search engines understand. Hire a writer fluent in SEO, or–even better–hire an SEO firm. You’ll get much more bang for your buck.

How late can I call you?

Everyone works long hours from time to time, but don’t expect your designer to be at your beck and call 24/7/365. You have established business hours during which it is appropriate for customers to reach you, and so does your designer or web shop. It’s great that you’re up at 2:00 a.m. thinking about your website, but that doesn’t mean your designer is.

It’s also much more efficient if questions, comments, concerns and changes are collected, documented, and presented to the designer all at once in an organized fashion. Constantly responding to minute, incremental changes can lead to bad design, whereas looking at requested changes as a whole in relation to the design as it exists can effectively drive further development.

In the earlier days of the web, sites were built with hand-coded HTML. Then came the rise of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, which allowed non-programmers to develop sites.

Finally along came Content Management Systems (CMS) which allowed the content (the words) to be separated from the structure (layout, fonts, navigation, etc.). Anyone in an organization could make updates to text, upload new files, and take care of all the minor changes without having to know anything about how their site was actually built.

Most sites today are built using some sort of CMS, either homegrown, open source, or purchased. How do you decide which is right for you?

Purchased

Purchased CMSs are just that: they cost money up-front. You don’t have to do the development work to build it, the vendor takes care of updates, and provides technical support. Most will also offer hosting so you don’t even have to install the CMS yourself.

Despite these upsides, purchased CMSs do have their drawbacks. Usually you cannot install plugins to extend the capabilities of the CMS. These products are not necessarily designed to be interoperable with other systems, much like desktop software, and any extended capabilities involve a feature request and/or waiting for a product update. However, if your needs are straightforward and your resources for in-house support are limited, a purchased “out-of-the-box” CMS could be a good choice for you.

Homegrown

A custom developed or homegrown CMS is a route often taken by larger companies with IT and programming resources in-house. Developing a custom CMS is quite an undertaking, the same as writing any software. This is a road you should travel down with caution.

A homegrown CMS can be a beautiful thing for a business. It’s software developed by you and for you, so (hopefully) it acutely and precisely addresses the needs of your organization. It eliminates the need for third-party applications, and can be written to conform to your existing web platform (ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc.). New features can be developed and tested in-house, and deployed safely and securely.

But every one of these advantages can also be a disadvantage. Whether developed by your own IT or web team, or outsourced to a web shop, developing a custom CMS is a lengthy process involving needs assessment, programming and coding, testing, evaluation, and so on. What this means is money. You’ve got to pay the salaries of everyone involved during the process, and that’s money that might otherwise be spent on other projects.

Third party applications are much the same: while there might be any number of plugins or extensions to a purchased or open source CMS, for a custom CMS to accomplish the same new task it must be developed from the ground up. And if you decide to move from a .NET web environment to PHP, your CMS must again be redeveloped.

Open Source

Open source (free) CMSs are very popular for businesses of all sizes. They eliminate the need for ground-up development and provide access to a wealth of third-party extensions and plugins to enhance their functionality. All updates, security patches and the like are handled by the developer, and are also provided free of charge.

Being open source, you are free to make modifications to the programming to suit your needs. Regardless of your web platform, there is an open source CMS to meet your needs.

As with a homegrown CMS, an open source platform demands resources and time to maintain. Whether those resources are in-house or outsourced, you will spend money for system upkeep. They also require developers who are fluent in the CMS‘ programming language and a tight integration of your web and IT teams for maximum efficacy.

Summary

All three types of content management systems–purchased, custom developed, and open source–have advantages and disadvantages. These variables will vary in relation to the resources you have at hand. All three also have costs involved: just because a platform is free to obtain doesn’t mean it’s free to maintain; conversely, just because a platform costs money up front doesn’t make it the most economical choice. You must consider your organization’s needs, resources, and flexibility in evaluating the right CMS.

Next Steps

In part two, we’ll look at the types of features and capabilities of content management systems that must be evaluated.

Web design shops generally do one thing very well: design websites. Your company presumably does one thing very well: sell your products.

As you’re building and maintaining your company’s website, having good products to sell and a beautiful, functional website are obviously important. But what about content? Without content–the words and information–your site is useless.

If you’re migrating your existing site as-is into a new design, you’re all set. This is usually not the case, as a website redesign is predicated upon a need to update a site’s content as well as the visual design. Some existing content can and should be repurposed, but what parts? And how?

A key element of website design and construction is ongoing maintenance. You may wish to perform these updates internally, or hire an outside source such as a freelance web writer or the initial designer. Either way, the platform upon which the site is built is a crucial consideration.

Static HTML

If your site does not require frequent updates, you and your designer may elect to build the site in static HTML. Building a site this way makes ongoing updates slightly more tricky, as the design and content are integrated. This means that to update just the text on pages, you must open the and edit the file containing not just that text but the code that builds the page itself.

An experienced designer will know how to successfully perform these updates without issue. However if internal resources such as Marketing and Communications personnel–who usually don’t have much experience with the technical aspects of building websites–will be making updates, static HTML sites are not as ideal.

Simply adding an image to a page requires the person performing the update to either have a working knowledge of HTML and your web server’s file system, or a good familiarity with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring tool such as Dreamweaver. This can be daunting to non-technical staff, and requires education and training.

Content Management System (CMS)

Many websites today are built using a content management system (CMS). A CMS allows the technical parts of a website including the look and feel, back-end programming and navigation to be separated from the content. As such, non-technical staff who can use Microsoft Word usually know more than enough to update your website.

Web editors are presented with an attractive, easy-to-use back-end editing tool that is reminiscent of most word processing software–and in fact is usually more simple and straightforward. They select the page they need to edit, make their text changes, and click “Save.” All controlling elements such as text size and image formatting are handled by the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and the CMS, ensuring that–for the most part–no matter what the editor does, the page will display correctly.

There are many paid and free or open source content management systems available. Your choice of CMS is determined in part by what you are willing or able to pay, and what hosting platform your site uses. Most commercial web hosting packages will include “click to install” CMS options such as WordPress and Joomla. They may also offer more technically sophisticated and flexible CMSs such as Drupal. Some CMSs are proprietary or run on proprietary back-ends, such as SharePoint and DotNetNuke that run on Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework.

You should work with your web design firm to pick the right option for you based on budget and your needs for ongoing maintenance. Ask them what they’ve used, what they like, what they’ve had success with, and why. That way you’ll be ensured that you make the right choice to give you the power and flexibility you need now and in the future.

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Unless you’re a one-person shop needing help with a small website, it is probably a requirement to prepare a Request For Proposals (RFP) for any major contract/vendor work. Building or redesigning your company’s website should be no exception.

Building an RPF accomplishes two main goals: it helps define the scope of the project both internally and for the web design firm, and it contains costs by making sure you get  fair and accurate bids for the work needed. There are many variables at play in building a site, including the size, graphic design needs, and functionality required. An RPF will ensure you don’t end up paying $15,000 for a $1,000 job, or that you get a $15,000 site and nothing less for that price.

There are many web design RPF sample templates available on the web you can reference as a starting point. Of course, some are better than others, so your mileage may vary. Let’s take a look at what should be included as you build your RFP.

Description, Purpose and Objectives

Why are you building a new website? Outline the scope of your web design project, including the problems you want to solve or any new capabilities the site will bring to your customers. Define who your target audience is, and identify secondary audiences.

Background Information

To effectively research your company, it is helpful for a web designer to have a bit of company history. If you have an existing website, provide links to this information. The more context a web design firm has, the better they will be able to produce a site that truly reflects your company’s history and goals.

Budget and Time Frame

This section should also include the anticipated budget range (a range allows for flexibility in providing solutions) and the desired completion date or project duration. What you are soliciting is a quote for your web design job, so web design firms can give a more accurate estimate of costs when they can factor in the requirements as well as the time frame.

Be aware that designers and firms may take two to four weeks to respond to an RFP, as they need to develop an initial project scope to define their estimate. Factor this response time, as well as the time needed to interview finalists, into your time frame.

Design Requirements

Most companies have an established set of brand guidelines. These guidelines include color palettes and corporate identity guidelines that must be utilized in any public-facing project.

Design also includes overall look and feel; use adjectives to describe how the site should feel to the user. It is appropriate to compare and contrast your desired finished site with other sites you do and do not like. Also be sure to indicate if there are any elements such as Flash animations desired.

If your company is subject to Americans with Disabilities Act legislation, your site must adhere to the requirements set forth by this legislation. Indicate your ADA compliance status and requirements.

Technical Requirements

Your web designer or firm will need to know how your site is hosted. Indicate who is your internet service and hosting provider and the platform on which your site will be hosted (Windows, Linux, etc.). The page delivery system is also crucial information (ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, etc.).

It also also important to include staff resources such as an internal web team and/or IT staff who can or will be utilized as resources on your web design project. Non-technical staff such as Marketing and Communications or Compliance may also be required to review web content and design elements.

Functionality and Programming Requirements

Describe any special functions your site must include, such as forms, e-commerce platform, content management system, and any other interactive features. Include how this information and the interactions involved need to work and who will manage them. Your web design firm will then be able to recommend either developing custom applications or using out-of-the-box, plug-in type applications, depending on your hosting platform, delivery system, requirements and budget.

Response Deadline and Contact Information

Be sure to include a submission deadline for responses, and to whom those responses should be directed.

This is something of a bird’s eye view of the construction of an RFP. There may be other pieces of information you may wish to include; look at samples from other companies or found on the internet for further research. This overall structure will be sufficient to set you on your way.

Looking for a web design firm? Get a free quote.

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Your company’s website is the face the public sees most often. It’s a primary means by which you acquire new customers, and it’s a service portal for existing customers. These days, as print catalogs and the telephone go the way of the dinosaurs, your site may be the only means of contact between you and your customers.

Now you’re ready for The Big Redesign (or possibly your first real website) and you’ve got to hire a web designer or web design firm. Without constructive, meaningful direction from you–the client–the web designer will be of little to no help in achieving your ultimate goal: building a website that serves the needs of your business.

The best way to ensure your needs will be met is to ask questions. You wouldn’t hire a new employee without an interview, so what makes a contractor or freelance worker any different? Leaving aside the technical details (platforms, programming languages, etc. that can be found in any resume or portfolio) for a moment, let’s take a broader look at some questions you may not have thought to ask.

How would you solve our problems?

Every business has a problem (or several). Chiefly, this problem is how to sell more stuff. Your website is to one degree or another incorporated into your sales and customer service structure. Therefore you have undoubtedly had customer, supplier or internal feedback on its design and information architecture.

By doing their homework, carefully examining the RFP (if you have one), looking into the needs of your industry as a whole and your business in particular, and demonstrating success with previous clients, a web designer should have several good, clear ideas about how to help you solve your website problems. They should be able to provide web traffic statistics and conversion goals from previous projects to validate their work with numbers.

Who will generate content?

A key component of website design that is often overlooked–either until the end or forever–is content. Without content, a fancy website means absolutely nothing. Most web design shops, big or small, are not staffed or equipped to generate quality content. Instead, many rely on reorganizing the content that you have into the new architecture and design.

This simply will not do. If your web design firm does not employ a professional writer on staff, hire one. If you have a marketing and communications department (even if it’s just one person), your designer needs to work with them. If you don’t have writers or marketers on staff, hire one freelance. Don’t rely on people–no matter how talented–who think in PHP or Photoshop to write good content.

How will you address user needs and usability issues?

There are two types of information on websites: information your customers/visitors want, and information you need to tell them. You know your product inside and out, and you know why it’s the best choice out there. That’s all great, but that doesn’t mean you have insight into what your customers or potential customers want to know about your business.

Your expertise also fails to translate into knowledge about how people actually use the web and thus your website. Should the navigation be on top, the left, or the right? Would a big green “BUY NOW” button be appropriate, or a small text link? You may think you know, but you probably don’t. A designer who makes amazing Flash sites with grungy backgrounds and blurry text might be making some serious art, but they may not be helping you sell.

A good web design firm will either conduct or recommend user testing, or for a small business demonstrate knowledge of user interface design best practices. Good interaction design will create the best of both worlds: your visitors have the opportunity to learn what you need to tell them, and it will be easy for them to find what they need.

Looking for a web design firm? Get a free quote.