Thinking about your site design

The critical first step in the process of identifying and hiring a web designer or design team is for you to have already thought about various aspects of the site you'd like to create. Keep in mind that the best and most useful web sites are information-centric, not technology or gee-whiz feature-centric. You not only want people to come to your site, you want them to come back a second time, finding the site a valuable part of their daily or weekly web travels.

As James C. Armstrong, Jr, Director of Engineering for The Internet Mall notes: "The most important thing I look for when outsourcing web site development is that they understand that the purpose of a web site is to present content efficiently, in an attractive manner."

Before you start looking for your designer, therefore, you'll need to identify exactly what kind of site you want to create. Here are some ingredients that you might toss into the stew:

Informational - like a really good marketing brochure, an informational web site answers all possible questions and concerns about your product or service, with testimonials from customers and feedback forms to solicit input from future customers.

Fun, interactive - static sites with valuable content are the mainstay of the Web today, but creating a more interactive site can reap significant benefits. Interactivity can be as simple as a search system so people can type in a keyword or two about the product they seek and have relevant pages on your site displayed, or as sophisticated as live database queries or even interactive games and entertainment to keep people amused.

There's an important caveat with any sort of game, however; you will not be successful if you help design a very busy site where people are coming to play your games and have fun, rather than to find out and possibly buy your products or services. You'll have all the costs - including increased server load, higher network demands - without any tangible benefits and without meeting the original business goals of your site.

Useful with up-to-date news of relevance - if you're in an industry where there's lots going on and important news each week, you might decide that having a top-of-the-news area on your site will prove invaluable to your potential customers. It can certainly demonstrate that you're plugged in to your industry. It's also a massive ongoing time sink; you can't take a month off and enjoy the delights of Tahiti without hiring someone to keep things up and running.

Keeping a site up-to-date is one of the biggest challenges and outsourcing, uh, contracting, a web designer doesn't simplify things. If you expect someone else to keep up on your industry, how are they going to have the knowledge and expertise to weed out the irrelevant from the important? If you have to do it, how are you going to find the time?

Archival: lots of older information, data, and files - another possible type of site is an archival site, where you have material of historical relevance (a copy of the 1917 tax code would be interesting, for example) and would like to include it on your site. This requires careful organization and an easy interactive search system. It would probably also require an automated indexing package too, so you could drop new files onto the server and have them instantly available to browsers.

Cyber-mirror - perhaps you already have your material (a newsletter is a good example) and you just want an online version as the heart of your web site. This is perhaps one of the easiest types of site to design because much of the content is already produced. Nonetheless, how are you going to translate the layout and artwork to a web-ready form? How are you going to get the information to the designer? How are you going to let visitors comb through the archive looking for interesting jewels of information?

Online transactions - static or interactive, web pages can only do so much before you're going to want to actually add buttons that say "give me your money" (well, maybe it'll be a bit more subtle than that!). Online sales are a reality today and there are a remarkable number of web sites that are processing thousands of dollars in transactions monthly, and even some moving much more than that each day. Implementing a secure real-time transaction system is not for the faint of heart, however. Pick the wrong solution and you could spend $5000 in a New York minute and still not have the system you desire.

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