Selecting a Web Design Company

• 
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• Why Going Green Makes Good Business Sense
• When is a Website Ready for Launch?
• iKobo Review
• Effective Email Communication
• Eliciting Constructive Website Feedback
• The Secrets of the Shriekers
• Offline Marketing Techniques
• Selecting a Web Design Company

Article Date: May 01, 2004

The following tutorial is written as a guide for businesses who wish to establish an affordable, effective web presence but are unsure as to how to do so.

By planning your website from start to finish, you will be able to experience the maximum amount of success possible with your site.

This tutorial is designed to help you do just that. It has been broken down into 6 steps which, if followed correctly, will ensure that you select the company that will help you accomplish all of your website goals.

Determine Your Site's Purpose and Content

The nature of your content should be split into two sections: mandatory content and optional content.

Mandatory Content

What are you trying to accomplish with your website? Do you wish to use your website as an online advertisement to promote your offline business (similar to a newspaper advertisement?) Do you wish to turn your website into a full-service e-commerce website, where transactions can be performed as they would offline? Most effective websites tend to fall somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum.

As a general rule of thumb, your website should be an extension of your offline business. At the very minimum, your website should outline your company, what it has to offer, and ways to get in touch with your company.

Optional Content

Optional, quality content can often enhance the quality of a website, increase website traffic and sales, and provide a sense of goodwill for your business. Examples of such content include:

• A "links" page to similar sites with relevant, quality content.
• Site search capability.
• Detailed product/service descriptions. The more detail you provide about your products/services, the more likely your customers are to purchase them.
• An e-zine/email newsletter containing relevant company and industry news and site updates.
• Contests/giveaways.
• Coupons/special offers. Coupons, particularly "website-exclusive" coupons, are one of the most effective ways to promote your business online. There are many people who spend a great deal of time on the Internet specifically looking for discount coupons and savings.
• Articles and helpful content related to your business.
• Macromedia Flash introduction/animations.
• E-commerce capability.

Note: much of this optional content can be considered mandatory, depending on the nature of your business and the proposed nature of your website.

Determine Non-Standard Sources of Content

Depending on the nature of your business, you may have access to offline content that can quickly and easily transported to your website, saving both time and money. This content can come from a variety of sources, such as:

• Suppliers/Vendors. If you are in a wholesale or a retail industry, your suppliers may publish CD-ROM and/or paper catalogues of products and services. They may also be willing to burn CD-ROMs of their product/service pictures and descriptions. Some suppliers even have "dealers-only" sections on their own websites where product resellers can download images and descriptions for use on their own websites.

  You may wish to establish reciprocal links between your website and your suppliers' websites as well, particularly if a supplier's website has a "dealer locator" search feature.

• Your own offline marketing content/descriptions. If you prepare offline marketing content using a computer, such as advertising and product signs/descriptions, this content can also be easily transported to your website.
• Customer testimonials.
• Descriptions of products and services as provided to you by friends, neighbours, and others not associated directly with your business. These descriptions can be especially helpful since they provide an insight as to how others perceive your products and services.

There are many other sources of non-standard content available; you're only limited to your own imagination in this regard!

Find Websites That Are Similar to What You're Looking For

Competitors' websites and industry information portals can often provide an idea to the designer of what it is that you're looking for with your own website. Menus, layouts, and content ideas can often be gathered by looking at what other websites have done.

You may find other ideas for layout and content from non-related websites as well. Perhaps a site you visit frequently that has nothing to do with your business has a unique navigation system, or maybe it has a search function which incorporates some level of artificial intelligence. Whatever the case may be, make your design company aware of the idea and why you like it. It can only help your site become more successful!

Put It All Together

Much like in Step 2, gather up all of the information and content that you would like on your website and put it into two sections: mandatory content and optional content. You may also wish to organize your optional content in "priority" order (i.e. the order in which you would like the content added to your website, if possible) as well.

Once you have done so, prepare a timeline outlining projected completion dates for your content. If your time projections are unrealistic, web design companies that you contact will let you know and should be able to provide alternate projections based on their experience.

Estimate Costs

There are two types of expenses involved in owning/operating a website: site design/update expenses and maintenance/promotion expenses.

Site Development/Update Expenses

Site development/update expenses are expenses related to the cost of designing the website itself. The more complex the website is, the greater the development expense. As a general rule of thumb, an effective website can be developed for under $3000. E-commerce websites can usually be developed for under $10000. This figure, however, depends on the number of products, taxation and shipping costs, and other issues, and developing an effective e-commerce site will require a great deal of extra planning and development.

Updates can vary greatly in price depending on the nature of the update.

Maintenance/Promotion Expenses

Maintenance/promotion expenses are expenses related to the ongoing costs of maintaining a web presence. These costs include:

• A domain name (i.e. a .com or a .ca). .com domain names should cost you no more than $25-$30 per year, and .ca domain names between $30-$35 per year.

  What is the difference between a .com and a .ca? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

  A .com domain name is slightly less expensive and more widely recognized than a .ca domain, but does not indicate the country of origin of the website. A .ca (short form for Canada) domain indicates that a website is Canadian-based, which can lead to a higher ranking in some directories and search engines (e.g. Yahoo!) However, it is slightly more expensive per year and is more difficult to remember.

  Certain companies and designer, such as myself, will spend $55-$65 per year to register both a .com domain name and the matching .ca domain name to take advantage of both the search engine ranking of a .ca and the offline marketability of a .com.

• A web host. A web host is the computer/server on which your website will be placed. Web host servers operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (all things going as they should) to serve web pages to those web surfers who request them. Many quality web hosts are available that will fit the needs of most websites for between $10-$20 per month ($120-$240 per year.) E-commerce hosting and hosting for sites with high traffic or that consume significant computer resource can be more expensive, however. A quality e-commerce host can cost anywhere from $45-$100 per month ($540-$1200 per year) or more, depending on the nature of the site and how much server resource it uses.
• Search engine submission/promotion. Set aside a budget of between $400-$500 per year to get your website quickly and properly listed and updated in the major search engines. While it is true that many search engines will accept free submissions, these free listings usually take a minimum of one month, and in many cases 10 weeks or longer, to appear in the search engines and can often "slip out" and have to be reindexed. A $500 per year online promotion investment, combined with an appropriate search engine description, will always produce results.

• Product information updates. Depending on the nature of your site and the frequency in which products change for your industry, this may be an additional incurred cost.

  Alternatively, you may want to have a self-administration section which would allow you to add/delete/modify content without intervention required by your web design company. Self-administration sections traditionally come with a fixed one-time cost, which serves to lower long-term costs.

The following additional expenses relate to e-commerce specifically:

• Secure Socket Layer. A Secure Socket Layer (or SSL for short) certificate is an item that is installed on a web server and encrypts sensitive information and data so that it cannot be intercepted in transfer from one machine to another. This is especially important when dealing with credit card numbers and other highly sensitive information. This can be accomplished via two methods:

  Option 1: Web hosts will often let you use their SSL at no extra charge as part of the package they offer. Sensitive information will not be compromised by doing this: however, the website's address will appear on the user's browser as something to the extent of https://www.(hostname).com/(your domain name).

  Option 2: purchase your own secure socket layer for approximately $250 per year. Some hosts may charge up to $125 to install it on your website's server as well. When installed on your web host's server, this secures any pages on your website you designate as "sensitive information" pages and protects any data that is transferred via forms or other methods from a web surfer's machine to the host (such as credit card information). Secured pages will appear as https://www.(your domain name).

• VISA, MasterCard and/or American Express Internet merchant accounts. VISA, MasterCard and American Express have created special merchant accounts for use on the Internet. Even if you have an existing credit card merchant account with your bank, you will need to reapply for an Internet-specific merchant account. However, most companies who have established an offline merchant account with a bank in the past (particularly those who perform mail/telephone order transactions with their accounts) can obtain an Internet merchant account. The discount rate (i.e. the rate a bank will charge for an Internet transaction) is usually between 3%-3.5% of the transaction.

  If you cannot obtain a merchant account from your bank, your payment processor (see below) may let you use their merchant account at a slightly higher discount rate (typically between 3.5%-5% of the transaction.)

• A credit card payment processing service (also known as a payment processor). When a user inputs credit card information on your website for the purposes of paying for products and services, a payment processor takes the credit card information, relays it to the financial that issued the credit card to the customer, and returns an "approved" response if the customer has sufficient funds on his/her credit card to make the purchase and the credit card is valid, or "declined" for any other reason. If the transaction has been approved, the funds are withdrawn from the customer's card and deposited into your credit card merchant account (see above).

  If this seems confusing to you, think of the process used by merchant terminals in retail stores where you probably have used either your credit card or your Interac card at some point. When you swiped your card through the magnetic strip portion of the terminal, your card information was read and transmitted to the bank that issued your card for approval. When the card was approved, you were able to complete your purchase and walk out of the store with your product. This is the process used over the Internet to purchase goods and services, except that a customer must input credit card information by reading his/her card instead of merely sliding the card through a card reader.

  The cost for such a processing service will vary, depending upon the e-commerce provider. This is something your web design company should be able to help explain to you.

Summary of Costs

The following cost summaries are provided as guidelines only, and will vary depending upon your site's specific needs. They are meant merely to provide a "starting point" for cost estimation, and should not be taken as exact figures.

In both cases, the cost updates and site changes will vary greatly depending on the nature and growth of a website and the business it generates.

Meet/Discuss Your Needs With Prospective Companies

Now that you have a rough idea of what you want for your website and how much it will cost, meet with prospective design and development companies to discuss your ideas. Many design and development companies have some variant of a "quote request" form where they have specific questions.

To get the maximum benefit from this meeting and from your website, allow the design company to make suggestions as well. A web designer's experience can often allow him/her to see more effective solutions as a result. The old adage "two heads are better than one" certainly applies here.

Hopefully this tutorial will give you an idea of what to expect and how to get the results you want from your website without spending excessive amounts of money to do so.