There comes a time during the life of a business when most entrepreneurs pencil into their business plan ‘must have a website’. Alternatively, you may have been asked to commission a site for your company or professional association with the help of a web design company or consultant.

I’m assuming here that you haven’t been asked to build the site or fallen into the trap of thinking that you can do it yourself. What Michael E. Gerber describes in his book ‘The E-Myth Revisited’ as that ‘Fatal Assumption’. No, resist the temptation and give the ‘technician’ in you a vacation.

Let us dispense with what most people think should be the first question: how much? When asked this question I always reply ‘one million bucks, please’. I always add the ‘please’ to lessen the blow. Well, think about it. It’s like getting into a cab at JFK and asking the driver ‘how much?’ How much to where? Grand Central Station or Boston? It really depends on how far and how quickly.

To answer the question ‘how much’ you need to consider at least these seven questions before you’re too far down the road of commissioning your site.

1. What are the business goals of the site?

As the client you must be able to clearly articulate why you need a website. What do you want your site to accomplish? As with any IT project, it helps to have clearly defined business goals and objectives; if you leave this important question to your web design company or consultant, you’ll end up with technical goals and objectives which aren’t necessarily the same as your business goals and objectives. Typical objectives include:

• Advertising products and services
• Selling products or services
• Providing customer support
• Reinforcing brand image
• Providing product information cost-effectively

Make sure your business objectives are S.M.A.R.T:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely

2. Do I own my domain name?

Sounds obvious, but this detail is often overlooked when developing a web presence. Your domain name is exclusive to you and is an important part of your Internet branding and marketing. But have you registered a domain name? Most important, do you own it? If you have engaged a consultant or web design company to register a name on your behalf, then it is importantly that they register you or your company as the owner – not themselves. There are countless tales of woe on the net where companies or consultants have ‘disappeared’ leaving the site owners without access to their domain names. Online, your domain name is your business.

3. Do I own the intellectual property of the site?

If you are providing the graphics, logos and content of the site, you must own the intellectual property rights, or have secured the rights to use them. Most web design companies and consultants will assume this is your responsibility, not theirs. So make sure you have all such permissions ready

If you have engaged a web design company, they would normally own the intellectual property to the material they have produced for your site such as graphics, logos and any content, until such time that they sign it over to you upon completion of the project. This is a contractual matter that needs to be discussed and agreed with your web design company or consultant and legally reviewed by your attorney.

Most web design companies will contractually retain ownership of their work until such time as final payment has been made and all contractual terms have been met – but it pays to read the small print. If your site uses ‘backend’ technologies such as databases and proprietary code that are critical to your business, it is important that they too are included in the agreement; at the very least you should have agreed some form of licensing of the technology.

4. Do I have useful and relevant content?

Many projects come to a grinding halt when the time comes for clients to actually produce content for their site. The type of content your site requires will depend on your business goals and objectives. If the primary function of your site is to sell something, then you will require specific sales copy. This is not a trivial task and if your business depends upon sales from your site, you would do well to budget for a professional copywriter. For those who want to go it alone, an excellent book on the subject is ‘Web Copy That Sells’ by Maria Veloso.

5. Who will maintain the site?

You should think of your website as a machine, and as such it will require periodic maintenance. There are two sides to this: keeping the site up and running, and the periodic updating of content (see 6 below).

Your hosting provider should keep your site up and running as part of their normal contract, except in abnormal circumstances when they have to take your site down (read the Tetsou article: The Digg Effect). However, in the early stages you may have to change some of your site’s hosting parameters, such as adding or changing an autoresponder or setting up a new mailbox. Depending on your hosting contract, support staff may only provide limited assistance with these things and simply point you in the direction of their hosting control panel. Unless you have a good understanding of such things, you’ll need to factor this maintenance into the cost of running a site.

6. How will I update the site content?

On the other side of the coin is your content. You’ll almost certainly want to update this – how frequently will depend on what your site does. With sales copy, you may have to cycle through several variations of an ad before you achieve the sales conversion you are looking for; if your site is advertising products and services, these may need updating monthly or even weekly. If the content of your site is made up of many pages of information that change frequently (daily, weekly or monthly) then you may need to invest in a Content Management System (CMS).

I’ll be looking at CMS options in a later article, but for now let’s just say that a CMS is a more user-friendly way of maintaining a site’s content, usually by means of a ‘back-end’ database to store and manage the content. A Blog is a form of CMS.

But, be assured that your site will need maintenance and your content updating and you’ll need to understand how often this will need to be done and by whom. Again, you’ll need to factor content creation and updates into your cost model.

7. How will I promote the site?

You can build the best site in the world and have great content, but if no one knows about it, you’ll have wasted your money. Your site is just one of many millions appearing on the net every day. Promoting your site should be part of a broader marketing strategy that culminates in a sale. Marketing, says Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing Attack, is ‘simply the truth made interesting and communicated to all interested parties.’ But first they have to find you.

Search engines and directories are the main way Internet users find a web site. It’s not the only way, but it come top of the list. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site is therefore an important part of your online marketing strategy. You should be thinking about how your target audience searches and how best to design your site from the outset, not as an afterthought. Raise this question early on in the design process and ensure your web design company or consultant has the specialist skills necessary to perform this function.

Tetsou

NOTE: The preceding article contains general information only. It does not contain legal advice. For legal advice, you should consult an attorney about your specific situation.