Once you decide on building a website, you start trying to figure out the what and how. The average marketing person is usually overwhelmed by the idea of choosing which development company to work with. What I am most concerned about is that I notice that , as they should, marketing people often ask their colleagues from other organizations for recommendations. Problem is, those colleagues may not be basing their recommendations on a good solid understanding – so I see lots of recommendations made for developers that may not be the best for the job. In fact, I never understood how when someone asks as general a question as  – “Who should I consider for building my website?”, so many people are quick to recommend. There is quite a difference between the skills required to build different types of sites. The marketer goes and looks at the development company’s site, browses through their portfolio and decides if he is impressed with the client list and likes the way the sites look enough to call the company and start a dialog. At this point, he probably already knows enough to throw around some buzz words to indicate to the development company what he is looking for – open source, CMS, Drupal, Joomla, SEO, shopping cart. . .

Many developers will, not surprisingly, seize on each opportunity that comes their way. Recently, we entered into the RFP process with a very large institution. We defined the site requirements and began a search for the right company to meet those requirements. One candidate, a not so small local development company of 100 employees, claimed expertise in one of the main requirements. It was only upon looking at what that claim was based on that we could determine that their so-called expertise was a significant exageration and could have been disastrous for the client. Building a site is child’s play today. Knowing how to build a site that meets the clients needs, will serve the client for some time to come, and is resilient and scalable from both a technical point of view as well as a marketing one, is another story. I have not met many developers in Israel who do this yet. In fact, even in the industries where there is little room for mistakes, the results are highly disappointing. For anyone that has experienced banking online, for example, just about any comparison between the experience locally and the experience with a large American bank, is like night and day. The problem can exist on several levels – design, UI, user experience, performance, technology.

Know that designing a website is tedious. It requires a wide variety of skills and you are unlikely to find one company that excels in everything. I have met countless small development companies that advertise everything from their open source expertise to their copy writing to SEO skills and don’t know much more than html. I am still trying to figure out how someone that hardly spoke English convinced clients to allow him to work on their SEO to the US American market. If a client is not up to speed- does that mean you are supposed to take advantage of them?
Here are my 5 tips for starting the process of building your online presence
1. Whether you are doing a redesign/rebuild of an existing site or a new site, force yourself to sit down and write down the goals of the site. 9/10 clients that I meet can’t answer me when I ask them what their online goals are. If it is to increase sales, for example, then my next question would be, as to whether you actually want to sell online. Of course many B2B companies are not selling online. But it’s still legitimate to use their online presence to increase sales – by developing leads and building the brand. So if a goal is to develop leads, then you at least know you want to convert visitors to the site to leads!
2. Have some budget in mind with the idea that it will likely need to change. If you think that today, you can build a top notch site on the cheap, sorry, you are very wrong. Budgets range from a few thousand to a few million – figure out where you can be inside that spectrum.
3. Look at what your competitors are doing. But if it does not impress you, do not feel compelled to duplicate them. Thinking out of the box online is what has led to the development
of so many interesting applications and experiences online. Give your visitor an experience that they will remember. Give them a reason to come back, to talk about you, to believe in you. We are years beyond the 2 dimensional corporate brochure sites. And if your CEO tells you that your industry happens to be the one industry in which online activity is not so important, get up the guts to tell him he is wrong.
4.Pricing for services will depend on how complicated the design of the website is. Create a Marketing Requirements Document to define everything you need the site to do. Many companies give the developers vague instructions and the end result is usually not satisfactory. If you don’t feel like you have a grasp on what you need, get help. This is a major part of your business. It’s kind of like building a house. You want an architect to figure out how to implement your needs and likes. Imagine what the house would look like if it was up to you and the builder. He would do what is easiest for him, you would neglect to spec out half of what is needed and when you find that you forgot to put electricty in the bedroom or a door to the backyard, going back to fix it will be messy and expensive.
5. Understand the pluses and minuses of having a CMS. You may not need one. If you do need one, maybe it can be basic. If it is a proprietary system keep in mind that you will have an ongoing relationship with the web developer – it’s his system and only he will be willing to support it. And when a developer tells you that the CMS is SEO compatible, you need to check that it is so. We have reviewed countless systems for clients over the years – none have come through as SEO-ready out of the box.