When considering a website for your business, it’s important to think about everything your website will be doing for you. Many small businesses just want a website that they can point potential clients to, but if their website is just a couple of static pages, those clients will quickly forget about that website. So what should you be looking for in a website? Let’s look at some quick tips and important points that you should always consider before your website ever hits the internet.

1)Web Design(er)s and your pocketbook

So you think you found someone that can do your website for under $1,000. That’s all well and good, but what exactly do you expect out of this? Most college students or beginning freelancers will gladly charge you their bare minimum for a site because they need the cash and you’re interested. But you’ll definitely get what you pay for.

Consider going with a reputable web design firm. You should expect to pay 10,000+ depending on how big your website actually needs to be. The important thing to understand is a good web design firm will spend every working moment dedicated to your company until the website is up and running. A great web design company will have also made sure to factored in upkeep time in their quote and continue to maintain your website for a pre-determined period of time after your site is live.

2)Time: How long should I expect to wait for my site to be finished?

A quick way to find out if you’ve got a great web design firm is how long the website will take to finish. The average website should take between two to three weeks to complete. If your web designer guarantees that your site will be done in under a week, ask them when they expect to take the time to find out what your company wants and what you are looking for. Conversely, if you’re paying someone and they offer you a discount because your site will take more than a month, do they really care about you or your company? Chances are they’ve got someone else that’s paying them more and they’re bumping that company in front of yours.

3)What exactly goes in to a web design?

A lot of companies have a hard time paying someone $10,000 just to design their website. Well let’s look at what all goes into making your page look and function as it does.

The first phase should be spent solely in understanding your company and in deciding how the website should function. This time should also be spent in major conversation with you, the client. Discovering what you want out of your website, what types of colors, font faces, design elements and number of pages are just some of what a web designer does before the actual design even starts. Next a series of mockups that show the full design in image format should be produced. This gives you the opportunity to understand exactly how your website will look. At this point, the design team will be entering the later phase(s) and are barely halfway through the process. *Check out our process at RM*

Now comes the coding. This is by far the most misunderstood part of what goes into web design. Chances are if your looking to have a site designed, you haven’t even thought about what goes into the coding process, you really only care that your site looks great and works the way it should. Well let’s try and understand what it takes to make that happen. Great code can easily take more than 200 hours. Why? Well think of the number of browsers that are out there. Internet Explorer currently has three major versions (IE6, IE7 and IE8) that all have minor tweaks that a coder has to pay attention to in order to get the website to look the same in each one. Then you have your emerging web browsers (Firefox and Safari) that a coder must pay attention to as well.

Those are just the basic elements to coding. Let’s say that you have a blog on your website. Depending on the CMS platform, a coder must then convert your base code (HTML and CSS) into a different type of code (usually PHP, but varies based on the platform used).

Now let’s imagine that you have a fancy header that has images transition (like a slideshow). A coder must add scripts (i.e. javascript, ajax) to make everything function properly. And that’s just the easy coding. There are many more indepth coding processes used for fancier websites like you might see on an eCommerce site.

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So today I’ve talked about what goes into a website before you ever see it live. Tomorrow I’ll talk about what you, as the client, need to do to help the process along and keep your website updated with fresh content.