Experience Isn’t Everything
Most people will tell you that the most important thing is experience. A designer who doesn’t have a lot of experience, they’ll tell you, can’t give you the quality that an experienced designer can. I don’t agree. While experience can be useful, it can also be a drawback. Just because a designer has less experience doesn’t mean that he or she can’t build a beautiful site for you.
Before you base your decision solely on how many sites they’ve built or how long they’ve been in business, think about this:
• Many long-time designers are stuck in their habits and might not be willing or able to give you a cutting edge website (if that’s what you want).
• Younger designers are more likely to have gone to school to get a Web design degree. While this isn’t vital either, it does tell you that this person has academic knowledge that an older designer might only have through practice.
Take Note: If a designer says they’ve been building websites since before 1995, they are almost definitely exaggerating. When I started working on the Web in 1995, very very few people had even heard of the Web, let alone had set up a business. I was working at an Internet company, which is the only reason I was involved with it at that time.

Ask to See Their Portfolio
While experience might not be important, having a good portfolio is. You shouldn’t be as concerned with whether the portfolio is made up of live sites, so much that the examples show diversity and range for the designer. Ask to see the portfolio online so that you can see how the websites they’ve built actually work. This is especially important if you’re looking for a designer to build any type of interactivity for your website.

Some people will tell you that the way the potential Web designer’s personal site looks is a good measure of how good a designer they will be. But I disagree with this too. While I do think having a good Web design business site is important. I don’t think that it’s a good indicator of how well they would design your site. Most designers design their business site when they’re not working on paying jobs. And if they have tons of time to modify their business site, then they don’t have a lot of experience, do they? But they might have a good portfolio. So you have to judge for yourself.

What Skills Do They Have or Offer
To assess this in a Web designer, you need to know what you need on your website. This can be hard. But some skills that they should definitely know include:
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
And it would be good if they know or can bring in as a sub-contractor someone who knows PHP, Flash, Ajax, SEO, content writing, and graphics creation.
The best way to assess this is to ask them.
Take Note: While it is remotely possible that one person will know all of those technologies, it is unlikely that they will know them all well. If they tell you they don’t like JavaScript, so they sub-contract all JavaScript work out to someone else, you should consider this a bonus. They know their weaknesses and have figured out a way to work around them.

Jennifer Kyrnin

If your site has a search engine, it is important to be able to report on user search queries and the number of results for each search. When configuring your search application, make sure the search query and number of results is a visible parameter in the results string.

Many companies don’t think about measurement when building a site, and they get stuck trying to retrofit it later. This can be a tough task. There are numerous technological decisions that will have an impact on your measurement strategy, your report accuracy, and your ability to analyze the data. Let’s look at a few key points that will help you to ensure accurate and effective analytics.

It all starts with strategic planning

Web analytics experts—and common sense—will tell you that upfront planning is the key to a successful measurement program. In short, without deciding in advance what you want to measure, you’ll have an exceedingly difficult time constructing a solution that gives you the information you need. You simply can’t improve the results of your analysis without first defining the key metrics that have an impact on your business.

Measurement plans come in all shapes and sizes. Each business has different goals, specific ways to segment visitors, and different priorities placed on key performance indicators. For an e-commerce site, it’s essential to look closely at conversion rates and shopping-cart abandonment, while a content-driven site might be more concerned about the time spent on the site, advertising impressions, and subscription conversion rates.

While planning is critical, the next step is to make sure that your measurement and technology teams are working in tandem. It’s time to knock down those cubicle walls, crack open a Red Bull or two, and start working together. There are technical challenges that need to be addressed in order to ensure that your analytics solution provides information you need.

You can’t report on data you don’t collect

Almost all leading web analytics solutions use client-side tagging to collect data, which generally involves placing a small snippet of JavaScript code on every page of your site. A good example is the popular Google Analytics which requires your site to include specific code on your pages.

It is critical to audit the entire site to ensure that every page includes this tag. Otherwise, you can’t ensure that you’re tracking all your traffic. For complex sites with multiple templates and different applications, it is easy to miss tagging sections of the site entirely. Commonly overlooked areas include pop-up windows, microsites, third-party sites, and custom applications. Make sure you have a development workflow that ensures that new pages are always getting tagged.

Be first to the party…and bring cookies

This client-side tagging uses cookies to identify each unique visitor and tie data to user sessions. It is important to ensure that your chosen tracking solution sets a first party cookie associated with your domain, and not a third party cookie associated with someone else’s.

Advertising networks such as DoubleClick generally set cookies associated with their domains, even though they’re created on your site. In the same fashion, hosted analytics services typically offer third-party cookies as the default option. Most hosted analytics services now offer methods to provide first-party cookies.

To combat users’ privacy concerns, many browsers now give the option to block these third-party cookies entirely, which can significantly decrease the accuracy of your reports. First-party cookies, on the other hand, are more widely accepted, and can provide you with the data you need for analysis. It’s important to ensure that your web analytics solution uses them, even if you are using a hosted analytics service.

Think of your web pages as snowflakes—Each is unique.

Web analytics track visitors by examining the different pages they visit on your site. In order to have accurate and meaningful statistics, the software must be able to identify each page uniquely. Database-driven dynamic pages can present challenges in this regard. By running many pages through a single template, you can lose insight into path analysis, content groups, and conversion objectives.

Luckily, many web-analytics tools are sophisticated enough to identify URL parameters and recognize them as unique pages. If you have already selected a web analytics tool, it is essential to review its capabilities and requirements for tracking dynamic pages.

There are several programmatic solutions to these problems:
• Use a server-based URL rewrite method to display your dynamic URLs as unique static pages. On Apache, mod_rewrite is a widely used solution for this problem, which makes it fairly easy to map URLs such as “http://example.com/index.php?page_num=1” to a clean URL such as “http://example.com/page_num1.html”. Creating these friendly URLs is more work up front, but can pay dividends for analytics, as well as for search engine optimization.
• Make sure each template-driven page has unique parameters in the URL. Some web applications will run everything through a single URL with the exact same parameters. For example, if you have a multi-step form driven from the same page template, be sure that there are unique url parameters such as “step=1” that identify each unique step for tracking.
• Configure web applications to dynamically set custom variables at the page level. Sometimes, you are limited in your ability to change the URL structure or set new URL parameters. Many advanced analytics tools allow you to set custom variables in the code as meta tags, or within the analytics JavaScript tag itself. The Google Analytics code from earlier is a simple example of this, as you see that it uses a tracking number to identify your site from all the others that it tracks.

Content management systems—Analytics friend or foe?

Many sites today are driven by content management systems (CMS), which allow non-technical users to create and manage content. Integrating your analytics data collection into your CMS is one of the single biggest opportunities to streamline and automate your reporting. Site tagging and measurement should be a byproduct of your content publishing process. Here are a few examples:
• Content Groups: Analytics tools can organize individual pages into higher level user-defined groups. As you plan the content organization for your website and set up a CMS, align each content area to the desired analytics content group. You can then extend the CMS to automatically set the appropriate content group tags on each page. As new content is added, the content groups are dynamically added and fed directly into your reports. This is an elegant solution which reduces ongoing tagging work and can make grown analysts weep for joy.
• Page Titles: Most reports use the contents of the HTML title element as the name of the page. However, page titles are often completely meaningless and fail to provide context to the content of the pages. Most analytics solutions support alternative page titles, so simply add a field in your CMS which asks for a meaningful page name, and program your site to add it into the template. As content contributors add content, those page names will be automatically associated with each page, which is a big win.
• Custom Metadata: There are often additional types of data in a CMS that describe content. For example, Digital Web Magazine may want to track the popularity of specific authors across its site. Because authors can belong to multiple content groups, a custom variable can be set on each page which identifies the author and feeds into a specific report. The data has already been defined and the CMS can be extended to include it in the template. As new authors are added, pages are automatically tagged and fed directly into the reports.

By automating the tagging process and integrating it with your content-publishing workflow, you can streamline the reporting process and save significant time and energy along the way.

Onsite searching

If your site has a search engine, it is important to be able to report on user search queries and the number of results for each search. When configuring your search application, make sure the search query and number of results is a visible parameter in the results string. For example, if a user searches for “web analytics” on Digital Web Magazine, the URL looks like:

http://www.digital-web.com/search/?q=web+analytics&x=0&y=0

This enables a report to be configured which measures top site searches. If this is not possible with your search engine, you may need to set the values as custom variables on the results page.

Additional considerations

Other things to keep in mind include:
• File downloads such as PDF and Word documents are not typically tracked with client-side tagging. It may be necessary to add custom code to the links in order to accurately track downloads.
• Flash and AJAX interactivity is not based on unique page views, and can be a measurement black hole. However, it is possible to track them with some additional development work and a little more upfront planning. Evaluate how and why you are using these technologies, and understand the measurement trade-offs.
• E-commerce applications, like content management systems, need to be configured to allow key variables such as product IDs, cost, units, and commerce checkout steps to be tracked correctly. Be sure your developers understand the tracking requirements. Without a properly configured e-commerce application, you will lose valuable data regarding sales and shopping cart abandonment.
• Use common names and values that can link online and offline data. For example, instead of setting an arbitrary product ID number, use the SKU from your inventory system. Set customer identification numbers that match the ones used in your customer relationship management system. This can enable you to merge data and correlate online and offline reports for advanced analysis.

Conclusion

If you are in the position of redesigning your site or changing the technology platform, be sure to get your measurement and technology teams together early and often. The above considerations are some of the common trouble spots, but remember that these are simply technology challenges. Solving them doesn’t replace the need for a well thought out measurement strategy. While it may take a little bit more time up front, getting it right the first time is far easier than going back later (or worse, never at all) to reconfigure your site architecture.

1) Content
Create and maintain actual content on your Web site. If you’re trying to sell something, it helps if you have articles and information about it. If you’re providing information, make sure that you have more than just lists of links for your customers to browse. Having high quality content that is updated regularly will keep your customers coming back.

2) Write and send a newsletter regularly
Newsletters remind your customers that your site is still there. Even if everyone who is subscribed doesn’t visit every time you send, you still keep your site in their mind. Also, since it’s email it’s easy for your readers to send it on to their friends, thus increasing your potential customer base.

3) Post to related newsgroups
Groups like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, or even the About forums have many topics – there is sure to be one related to your Web site. Get involved with the forum – don’t just post ads, and your site will get more traffic. Be sure to include your URL in your signature.

4) Post to related mailing lists
Just like the newsgroups, you should find related lists and get involved on them. You can find lists at TopicA and List Universe.

5) Run a contest
Contests get people interested in your site. And if you have a good prize, you’ll get people excited to try to win. Be sure to include an official rules page, and you’ll want to find out if there are any rules in your state our contry regarding contests For example, in Canada, there must be a skill testing question to determine the winner.

6) Invite a guest speaker to your site
If there is someone in your field who is fairly prestigious, ask them if they might come and chat with your readers. If you have a chat room, you can hold the event there, otherwise, you can hold it in a public chat room. If they don’t want to chat, perhaps they would be willing to write a short note for your site. Remember it can’t hurt to ask.

7) Advertise online and off
Banner ads and text links are important, but offline advertising works too. Radio ads, ads in trade journals, and so on all help to generate interest in your site.

Give away free items
Purchase things like pens or stress balls with your Web site name and URL on them and give them away to your customers. Perhaps you could give them something if they fill out a marketing survey. Or you could create a screen saver related to your topic and give it away to first time visitors.

9) Copy Winners
If there are sites in your topic area that already get lots of hits, visit them to see what they do that is different from your site. If it’s at all possible, mimic what they do to add the same value on your site.

10) Watch your Page Views
Use your site tracking software to stay informed with what is working and what isn’t. It doesn’t do any good to purchase a new ad and then never determine if it actually worked.

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been part of a 5-week, 5-city speaking and book signing tour sponsored by Deluxe Corp called the Small Business Heroes tour. I’m excited about our next stop tomorrow which is Orlando and I’ve been thrilled to connect with and provide advice to many businesses in Denver, Portland and Austin. I was also thrilled to make my broadcast television debut with an interview on NBC news. I can never get over what a goofball I seem to be on camera but I was thankful for the opportunity and humbled by my interviewer, journalist and fellow entrepreneur Gregg Moss telling me he’s a big fan of this blog! Thank you!

While the Deluxe staff on the tour are giving free presentations on many topics I’ve spoken and written about including Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, building Web Sites and lots of others, my presentation for this tour is on “local marketing” – how you as a small business owner can easily use the Internet to *successfully* gain visibility and sales within a local area at very little cost.

I am currently working on a whole series of articles around this topic and if you have a local marketing success story, I would love to feature your business here! So if you have a local marketing success story to share you can tell me about it here.

One of the most successful tools to market locally is – surprise, surprise – Twitter! Small businesses all over the country are successfully using Twitter to win customers.

How are they doing it?

Examples abound.

There’s the Chicago based Domino’s franchisee who sends personalized videos (think Old Spice Guy, but less naked) to people who tweet both praise and complaints about his pizzas, getting him praise on 87,000 Web sites and fierce loyalty from his customers.

There’s the Santa Monica Hotel lounge that got 250 people into its lounge one night (to spend $$ on lots of other things) by offering free bubbly to it’s Twitter and Facebook followers for “friending” them and then accessing a secret passcode.

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There’s the San Francisco massage and wellness spa that regularly fills it’s open, unused appointments by offering last-minute, deep discounts to twitter followers.

The bottom line is – it works. But you have to know how it works and when it works — Twitter isn’t great for everything.

How can you make Twitter work for you?

All of these examples fall into the category of “remarkable” content either as:

1. An offer they can’t refuse – deep discounts & free champagne sound like pretty sweet deals. So sweet that they grab your attention and make you want to patronize the business if for no other reason than to check it out. Of course it’s up to the business to turn those newcomers into loyal customers but getting people in the door is far, far more than half the battle. The trick is to find an offer that is exciting, relevant to your business and affordable.

2. Content that is highly Personal and/or Strikingly Unusual – Ramon the Domino’s pizza franchisee didn’t have to spend a lot of money or offer deep discounts, he won loyalty with a secret weapon that is hard to copy or steal – his charm and personality. This is one of the areas that scares business owners the most – the kind of committment that Ramon shows to having a highly personal, highly communicative relationship with his customers. While this can be a home run for people who are lucky enough to have that personality, many business owners wouldn’t want to go down this path.

However here’s another example of a business owner who uses her personality and passion in a far less overwhelming way. The Pink Cake Box makes “extreme cakes” and the business owner simply posts photos of her cakes to Flickr. But the cakes are so remarkable and she’s been doing it consistently for so long (years) that she has built a Flickr following that now drives 10% of her Web site’s traffic.

The path you take depends on you.

Yes – you! And what resources are available to you including your own passions and skills. When you think of what to offer is it your personality (very time consuming) or a great deal (more of a financial investment)?

What can you do or offer?

Who is it exactly that you’re trying to reach and for what purpose? Getting new customers? Keeping old ones?

Make sure you figure out the answers to these questions first. If you’re not able to answer these questions, move on to something else. Perhaps local marketing and/or Twitter are not right for your business!

Discuss These Topics Live

If you’re in Orlando on October 5th or Charlotte, North Carolina on October 12th, you can see me walk through these topics in more depth in person at noon. I’ve also been known to sign a few copies of my book as well as sit down one-on-one with businesses for a bit of highly personalized advice.

I hope to see you there!

Ignore spam and websites that offer to submit your website to hundreds of search engines. At best these are wastes of time or money and at worst they can actually hurt your ranking.

Keyword Phrases
Rather than focusing on a single word, try adding a few words to make a keyword phrase. You may want to read about effective Google searches to see how keyword phrases help with searches.
If you were searching for your own website, what keyword phrase would you type into Google for each page? Would you look for super fast widgets? Would you look for cooking with widgets? It may be helpful to get a different perspective. Ask someone else to read your page and suggest what they think your keyword phrase might be. You can also check Google Trends to see if one phrase is starting to gain popularity.

Try to stick to one subject per page, and stick to one keyword phrase per page. That doesn’t mean you should write stilted text or use odd phrases. Clear writing is both easier to search and easier to read.

Density
One of the things Google looks for when it catalogs pages is the density of the keyword usage. In other words, how often the keyword occurs. Use natural phrasing. Don’t try to trick the search engine by repeating the same word over and over or making text “invisible.” It doesn’t work. In fact, some of that behavior even get your website banned. Read more: Google Dont’s – Bad Tips and Dirty Tricks That Will Get You Banned.

Give a strong opening paragraph. Google may or may not search beyond the first 200 words or so of your web site, but it definitely looks at the first paragraph for keyword density.

You can check your keyword density with Google Toolbar.

Name Your Pages
Give your pages a descriptive name with the title tag. This is vital. Google displays search results as a link using the Web page’s title. A link called ‘untitled’ isn’t enticing, and nobody is going to click on it. When appropriate, use the page’s keyword phrase in the title.

Learn more about why titles matter.

Link Early, Link Often
One of the biggest factors Google looks at is the hyperlink. Google looks at both links to and from your website.

Google looks at the words you use in links to help determine the content of your page. Use links within web pages as a way to emphasize keywords. Rather than saying, “click here to learn more about SEO” you should say: Read more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Learn more about why hyperlink names matter to Google.

Links from other websites to your website are used to determine PageRank. You can use Google Toolbar to check your current PageRank.

You can improve your PageRank by exchanging text links with other relevant websites. Banner exchanges are not as effective. You can also improve your PageRank by making sure your website is listed with important directories. In other words, check the PageRank of the home page of the directory.

Submit Your Site to the Right Directories
Submit your website to the open directory project, if possible. Google considers this directory to be an important link. Be patient. A real human has to check your site, before it’s listed in the Directory.

Submit your site to specialized directories. For instance, a work at home mother owned business (WAHM) should submit her site to WAHM directories. A site on butterflies should be sent to biology or entomology directories.

Don’t get too submission happy, though. Google, in an effort to combat click fraud, often filters out websites linked from link farms, or pages with nothing but links to other websites. This is one reason why free services to register your website may hurt you. Stick to specialized directories and organizations. They’re more likely to help and not hurt your rankings.

Social Networking
Social networking sites can be a good way to promote a site, but not all of them will affect your rank directly. Digg and Del.icio.us are social linking sites that could potentially have the most impact.
Make Your Graphics Search Friendly
Keep the Flash to a minimum. People may enjoy reading Flash, but search engines tend to skip right over it. Google has gained some ability to read Flash, but it is still limited. If your menus are in Flash, they might as well be invisible. Consider making plain text links in addition to or instead of Flash.

Give your images tags. Not only does it make your website more accessible to the visually impaired, it also gives you another chance to place your keywords where Google can see them.

Good Design Is Popular Design
In the end, strong, well organized pages are pages that Google tends to rank higher. They’re also pages that tend to become more popular, which means Google will rank them even higher. Keep good design in mind as you go, and much of the SEO will design itself.

Choosing a Content Management System: Getting Started

Traditional approaches to selecting enterprise software are not, in my view, as effective as what I call a scenario-driven approach. The former is driven by requirement checklists, executive mandates, and who plays golf with whom. A scenario-driven approach is based on what really matters: How a piece of software will be used every day, by both administrators and end-users. Happiness is not a warm set of 200-page Request for Proposal responses, nor is it checklist RFPs. Throw them out, along with your boss’ golf clubs, and then you might have hope. Better yet, you’ll be on your way to picking not the best product, but the right product for you and your situation.

Not convinced? Take, for example, the ubiquitous requirement: “The tool must be easy to use.” What makes a tool “easy to use”? It’s not the same for everyone. Every vendor says their product is easy to use: “No training, it’s intuitive, plug and play.” Blah, blah – cut through the marketing drivel and just test, really use the tool. What looks easy to use isn’t necessarily – you need to actually use it, in the way it’s going to be used in your organization, to know for sure.

If you’ve been looking at WCM tools at all, you’ve surely noticed that vendors (and many consultancies, and some analyst firms) tell very different stories. Some try to answer another frequently-asked question, “Who’s leading?” You should in turn ask, “Leading at what?” Finding a good software fit with your particular business objectives involves a few things:

• Conduct internal research. Before deciding whether you need to buy more technology at all, you need to do an internal analysis of your current capabilities. You may be able to extend existing WCM technology, or clean up your content to help your website work better. There’s a chance that deleting or archiving content, adding meta data, automating tasks, or redesiging your website’s front end may solve your problems. A little analysis here can save you a lot of time and money later.
• Outline the scenarios that aren’t currently being fulfilled by your existing technology set. Your marketing team can’t get the new product information on the web site in less than a few hours? Related content can’t be linked? Content is duplicated by manual cut-and-pasting all over your website? These are common scenarios. In choosing a new wesbite content management system, you should carefully outline what you’re trying to achieve with which types of content.
• Figure out which type of technology will provide the biggest near-term value. Knowing what type of scenario(s) you’re addressing allows you to begin to isolate vendors who potentially hit that sweet spot. You need to tell a “testable” story, one you can give to the vendors you’re considering so they can show how they fulfill your needs with their tools.
• Have a proper “bake-off.” You should expect competing vendors to show you how their tools can fulfill your needs. They shouldn’t be dazzling you with canned demos, but showing you what they can do with your content and for your situation. This is also the opportunity to know the people from the company who would work for you. Don’t sign a contract until you do. Remember, the vendor selection process is like dating. You want to really get to know who you’re dealing with before you make it a long-term relationship.
• Iteratively test before making your final selection. You should never select a product without having the chance to use it and test it yourself. Much like you wouldn’t use a Honda Civic to drive a Formula 1 race course, you shouldn’t use a complex WCM when all you need is something simple. Yet most people spend more time selecting a $30,000 car than they do a six-figure or potentially multimillion dollar software package. At least people take the car for a test drive. Very few enterprises do this with software. Don’t make the same mistake.

Choosing a Content Management System: Common Scenarios

So what are your needs when it comes to a website content management system? At one level, all WCMS do the same thing, but as we span the spectrum from basic sites to enterprise e-commerce, substantial differences emerge, concerning how content is managed, and certainly the cost and complexity of the systems. Use the checklists to see where you fall.

Basic Content Management Scenarios
Small to mid-sized websites with reasonably standard features are not necessarily always simple to manage; that said, the standard functionality required to run them is relatively well-known and widely available. There’s a large number of WCMS that can only fulfill these sorts of scenarios.
• A corporate brochure site
• A basic community-oriented Site
• A site with basic interactivity
• A simple Intranet for employees

Mid-range Content Management Scenarios
Sites begin to grow in size and complexity. Page counts number in the thousands, rather than the hundreds. Perhaps more important, the CMS begins to become more of an application platform to achieve specific communications and informational objectives.
• An enterprise-level Intranet for employees
• A site that features interactive marketing
• A site that incorporates various microsites

Complex Content Management Scenarios
In the realm of complex scenarios, the sites are just as much applications (or sets of interconnected applications) as they are collections of content. Page counts frequently rise into the tens to hundreds of thousands and, in the case of very large product-based companies or multinational enterprises, perhaps even number more than a million. Oftentimes, companies that start with the more mid-range scenarios evolve into needing a suite of more complex ones (such as E-Commerce or a Global Intranet) that must be tied together. This creates a need to accommodate more complex workflows, governance structures, and content models.
• Sites that serve as a global Intranet for employees
• Sites that handle various E-business revenue streams
• A site that incorporates multichannel publishing
• An ultra-large standalone site

So now that you know typical WCM scenarios, you might have an idea of which ones are applicable to you. In our WCM research, we evaluate the appropriateness of more than 50 vendors vis-à-vis the scenarios above. There’s not one vendor that does well in all, or even half, of the scenarios. But at least if you can clearly identify your situation and your needs, you’ll be in better shape to pick an appropriate tool. And then you can head out to play a leisurely, business-deal-free round of golf with somebody other than a potential vendor.

Today, the website of a company has usurped the front office as the place where first impressions are gleaned. Where it used to take a meeting or a few product samples for a customer to form an opinion about your business, now it’s only a matter of a simple Google search – which means you need to make sure that query result is a memorable one.

“Small businesses should be looking to have a personal presence on the Web – something that would back up a sales call or brochure,” says Tim Zack, a marketing executive at Red Clay Interactive, an Atlanta-based Web development firm. “It definitely shouldn’t be an afterthought – this is a capital investment in the success of your company.”

The following guide will teach you the basics on how to start your website, as well as provide tips on designing and marketing the site to help drive business.

How to Start a Website: What Do You Want to Accomplish?

The first thing you should assess before embarking on your online venture is what exactly you want to accomplish with your site. Do you want to sell products? Do you want to create a blog about your company or service? Depending on your industry and the nature of your business, your site may have a combination of different functions.

Below are some of the basic types of the sites, and what they can help you to achieve:

• Brochure/general information: This type of site basically serves as your online business card. It provides information about who you are, what your company does, product or service pricing, possibly previous and current clients, and how customers should contact you. BlueStar Energy and MonaVie are both companies with great examples of what a brochure site should accomplish.

• Retail/e-commerce: An e-commerce site allows your company to sell products directly to customers. Sites like Amazon and Zappos are great examples of the success the e-commerce site can afford a business. It usually employs the use of a shopping cart and payment processing utility, such as PayPal.

• Content-driven sites: These include sites like news aggregator The Huffington Post or streaming video hub Hulu, which generate revenue by posting fresh content on a regular basis, and maintain a library of hundreds or thousands of pages.

• Blogs: The blog can also be considered a content-based site, but more specifically, it involves a person (or people) from the company or site who regularly posts information relevant to their product or industry. Many business owners use this format to help generate a loyal customer following and drive sales. A great example would be the product blog of 37Signals, creator of popular project management tools Campfire and Basecamp.

• Database sites: Examples of these would be the localized classified site Craigslist or travel search engine Kayak, where users can search for content or information that has been amassed from different resources or websites.

• Forum or community sites: These sites usually involve large groups of people who share ideas and comments with one another on various topics. These include Q&A sites, such as Bizmore.
How to Start a Website: Do it Yourself, or Hire Someone?

After you’ve decided on the basic goals you want to accomplish with your website, next, you need to make the all-important decision of whether or not you’re going to build or buy. While there are tools such as GoDaddy.com or WordPress.com that have made it easier than ever to build a website, keep in mind that the process can still be time-consuming, and that you will probably need at least a passing knowledge of HTML code.

Mitchell York, president of E2E Coaching, a small business consulting firm, and founder of TechWeb, a technology news-related site, advises small businesses to go ahead and make the financial investment in hiring a designer, if they can afford it. “I think most people just find it very hard to do on their own,” York says. “If you had a store on Main Street and you had to decorate the window, you could just throw something up there, or hire someone who would do it so you would stop traffic. It’s the same thing.”

A good designer will likely cost you $1,500 and up, depending on the added tools and number of pages involved in the creation of your site.

How do you avoid hiring a designer or developer that builds a website like this? Here are some questions you can ask and some feedback to help you understand their answers.

1. What web standards do they follow?
This is a great question that will fluster someone who doesn’t have standards. What are web standards? This is the way of designing and coding a website that allows the website to grow with technology and the web visitor. This means using clean code and technologies like:

•CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): a simple mechanism for adding style like fonts, colors, and spacing to web pages
•XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language): a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax
•ECMA Scripts: the standard version of JavaScript used on most web browsers.
You don’t have to know how to write the languages; you just have to know what the standards are to understand the answer.

A simple way to help you connect to this question is to remember that people online don’t all use the same web browser or operating system. Designing and developing to standards gives your website the ability to look and function the way it should on different platforms.

2. Do they design for SEO best practices?
It’s no secret today that everyone wants a website that can be found on search engines. Implementing search engine optimization may not be what you want your designer or developer to do for you; however, how your site is designed or coded can affect your strategy when you are ready. When you interview developers, this is a great question to ask and see if the person you’re interviewing is familiar with how to code to meet SEO standards. Here are a few items that affect SEO best practices:

•CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): Designing a website to meet SEO best practices means using style sheets to cut down on the amount of code on your web page. Search engines like text, not code.
•Script files: When you use dynamic items on your site like image galleries or mouse-over menus, usually these are created through JavaScript. To follow proper SEO standards, script files should be created for pages instead of having the script on your web page.
•Web page content: Your text or content should be on the page as much as possible this can even include your website navigation. There are ways to make text visually appealing without having the designer put it inside an image. Images that contain words are not picked up as content by search engines.
If SEO is a strategy you are considering down the line, it’s a good idea to make sure your site will be built with this strategy in mind.

3. How do they plan for change or growth?
One of the most stressful lessons learned is that the website you built yesterday will not allow you to grow tomorrow. Being told you have to start over is one of those statements every business owner can’t bear to hear. Before you begin, ask the question, “Does the technology you’re using allow me to grow or add additional functions?” You may even want to take this further and think about tools you’d want to add down the line. You can also ask designers or developers to provide you with a brief list of tools they have already integrated with sites like yours. This allows you not only the opportunity to see if they are knowledgeable, but also whether they’re supportive in providing you with ideas.

4. How do they test their work?
As I mentioned above, not all of your consumers use the same technology. But to ensure things are operating the way they should or displaying correctly, web developers need to test their work. This issue might seem trivial, but you’d be surprised how many firms only test for one web browser. I recommend you ask specifically what web browsers and versions they test for during the development process. If you’re building an online community, social or e-commerce website, testing is an important part of your success. Secure payment gateways need to be tested in a real environment. Be sure to get the specifics of what your firm considers to be part of a test phase and what it’s being held accountable for after the website has gone live.

5. How do they handle support requests?
After a website has officially launched inevitably there will be a problem–it’s technology; it happens. The question you want to know before you put pen to contract is how does your new firm handle support or bugs–technical hiccups with the website? Every firm will approach this differently, so pay close attention to how it phrase its response and commitment.

Building a website depending on the functions you need can be a lot like putting a puzzle together. The key to success is finding the right firm who understands the pieces that need to come together for your business.