Know what you want. No design firm will read your mind. If you don't know what you want, you can spend too much going through one iteration after another. Educate yourself and find sites (even in areas unlike yours). Choose simple (like Google) or more substantial, and use a collection of sites as examples of what you might want.
Start communicating with a website design firm. It needn't be face-to-face but you must make sure you communicate well and get a feel for how easily you can work with them.
Look at each firm's portfolio. Some firms will be stuck in one style and if that isn't what you want, then they may not be a good fit for you.
Websites can be simple or complex (web applications). If you want to collect information, or you have a lot of information to present, you will need a database. You need to make sure a web design firm that you like can handle more complex websites. Know that the more complex a website, the more expensive.
A website that gets only a few visitors a month isn't a good investment. Your website designer needs to know Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or will work with one. Do NOT EVER believe in a guarantee of top placement in Google, Bing, etc. You need to have quality traffic coming to your site. See our checklist on choosing an SEO firm.
If you are interested in a blog, a good idea is to keep the blog onsite. Why attract visitors to a blog that isn't on your website and lose on what is called "Page Rank." The more searches your website gets the better and a blog will really help with this. A blog is (hopefully) being added to all the time and thus keeps the website changing and adding more keywords and relevant pages to your site.
Always change your mind. We just told you not to do this, but this is the long term. Discuss with your potential website design firm how often updates should be done. If your site is not going to have a blog, and not likely to change much, you should consider a rewrite of the site every so often. The design company should have experience in re-design and be able to suggest where you might go with your site. It can be a good way to grow your site by doing it in stages over time, which helps with the affordab
Web site copy. This is a key to getting traffic. It is now part of Search Engine Optimization ( SEO), but it is also key to getting people to stay on your site, buy your product. It is the key to "conversion" and to reducing "bounce". A bounce is where a person manages to find your site, but immediately leaves without buying, signing up, or reading more of your site.
When you are done, you want to walk away with either the rights to everything you paid for, or a working agreement with the company to do updates and support. All websites need support in one way or another. A web server may go down, or have other issues. Do not expect a website to be up 100% of the time, unless you want to pay a huge price. Websites that are up 5 9's (99.999% of the time) are a goal to reach but less should be acceptable. Of course, websites are often taken down during the wee hours of the
If your website is meant to be global, in that it will have multiple languages, make sure your webdesigner knows this up-front. It is best to do this work as the work progresses than at the end of a project.
Consider agreeing on a support contract with the web design company. If your website has issues, you want to be sure they will fix it quickly and having a contract that says that they will look at it within a short period of time, and/or will monitor the site is the best way to keep your site alive as much as possible. Why do you need to do this if your site is working at the end of a job? The server can crash, run out of memory, have network issues, or any one (or more) of a large number of unexpected prob
Email. This can be a make-or-break issue for a website. Do you send mail? Do you want to have email from your website, or with the same domain name? A webdesigner may be able to design a website but not know a thing about email services. Make sure you discuss the number of email boxes to be provided, the volume of mail coming in and going out, how critical the mail is (is one dela
This isn't about choosing a firm, but so many firms don't do this and you should educate them. Make sure your website is always known as one thing. It can have a "www" in front, or not, can have capital letters, or not, but it should be consistent. This is important as search engines may consider two subtly different web site addresses as being completely different websites and reduce Two sites with the same content can actually be penalized by search engines.
Financial matters. Generally a website design firm will need a deposit. One-third the estimate is a good amount.
Do a trial of a page or two with a website design firm. You want to know how well they work. Don't have multiple design firms do multiple pages (unless you absolutely love the result) as you can have design cohesion problems and what do you do when you want to add a feature that is on all pages? The communication issues here could be formidable.
Get a time line to know when milestones will be met. Add a little pressure on this but do not be surprised if the deadlines are not met. Websites are part art, part engineering. Art has never been known to meet deadlines; engineering, especially software, is notorious for going over budget and over time. Still, if your website is not complex, you should be able to expect your design firm to deliver on-time and at budget. The key here is communication.
Communication. Insist on frequent updates on progress. This should include screen shots, a URL (web site address) for a test site to look at, and status updates. Do not expect perfection in the initial stages, and make sure you feel it is going in the direction you want. The earlier the better you make course changes.
Don't change your mind. Of course, if you need to, you need to. But do your homework up front. Draw pictures of what you think your website should look like before you approach a website development firm. Know what you want as much as possible before you go shopping.