Before you start looking for a team to build your dream business website you need to make some decisions. Making these decisions early will help you find the team best suited to your project. It's important to be honest about your expectations up front.
1. What is your budget?
It's important to be honest and up front about your budget. The cost of your website will vary depending on the features you want. Being realistic about your budget will help your website team make good recommendations for your business. Don't try to get Amazon's website for $500.
If your business is new it's usually best to start small with a smaller website. As your business grows so will your website. Keep in mind that you can add on to your website in the future. If you don't have a lot to spend right now you can make improvements down the road.
2. What is the purpose of your website?
Why do you need a website? Here are some possible options. You can choose more than one.
- Provide information about your business to customers
- Provide information to investors
- Sell products
- Build a list of customers
3. Do you need e-commerce? Will you ever need e-commerce?
Are you planning to sell physical products through your website? If so you will need to add an e-commerce feature to your site.
If you plan to add e-commerce in the future you should also let your team know so they can select technology that can add an e-commerce feature.
4. How do you plan to update your site?
If you are planning to update your site yourself or have an employee make updates you need to let your website team know. Doing updates internally will limit your choice of platforms and may lead to additional development and training costs. So you need to really consider if you have the time and resources to make updates.
Unless you are comfortable making code changes you will need a content mangement system. If you only plan to update your site a couple of times per month adding a CMS (content management system) is probably not worth the costs. If you have e-commence you will most likely want to make updates internally.
5. Expected number of visitors each month?
You don't need to know the exact number of visitors but it's good to have a rough idea. This is help your website team recommend the right technology to serve your needs. If your business is serving a local area you will have less traffic than a business whose market is the entire United States or the entire world.
Also, if you're planning to advertise your site you will need to plan for potential traffic spikes. Thankfully modern hosting solutions can usually handle reasonable increases in traffic.
6. When do you need the website to launch?
This is another area where you need to be honest with your website team. Do you need your site to launch in a week? A month? Or is your deadline more flexible?
If you have a fixed deadline for an event or product launch let your team know early in the process. Ask them if they will be able to realistically meet your deadline. This includes any quality checks and bug fixes. If you have a hard deadline, get started early.
Also, keep in mind that you may not need to have every feature complete on launch day. If you need to start marketing your business' core services your team can focus on having those pages ready first. Other parts of your site can be added later.
Do not tell your team that you have a flexible deadline and then try to get them to meet a hard deadline later. Be upfront about your expectations and needs.
7. What expecations do you have for your website?
What are you expecting your website to do for you and your business? Also how will you measure your goals?
- Increase sales
- Get more leads
- Reduce the number of phone calls asking for directions or business hours
- Sell producs online
- Automate some business processes