Finding and Working with a Web Developer

Note: keywords and phrases are terms prospective customers are likely to use to describe your product or service or look for it on an Internet search engine. For example if one of the things you sell are baby shoes, typical keywords and phrases might be: "baby shoes", "infant shoes," "shoes for babies," "baby sneakers," "walking shoes for babies," etc. If you're not sure what keywords are important, ask friends, family and customers what they'd search for to find your type of products or services.

If you buy search engine advertising, use the tools provided by the search engines to help you discover important keywords.

5 - Decide whether you'll sell directly on the website, or just use the website to get leads.

6 - Decide on and prepare all the editorial information and marketing copy your website will contain. At minimum, you'll want a homepage (the main page for your site), a page or pages describing your products and services, an "about us" page and a "contact us" page. You should also consider having a page that will offer visitors a free newsletter or coupons or something that will get them to give you their email address so you can contact them again after they leave your website.

7 - Write or have a professional writer create the editorial content as soon as you decide what you want on the site. The purpose of your website is to market your business, and web developers usually just design and program sites. They don't write marketing copy. (If they do write copy, they usually don't write particularly good marketing copy.) Remember, the web developer can't finish the job until you give them the copy that goes on the website.

8 - Don't just hand the web developer your marketing brochure to put on the web. Marketing brochures are often the marketing equivalent of a coffee table book - they look nice, but don't do a great job of selling. A website's job is to get attention AND get the prospect to take action. In other words, to sell.

9 - Decide what photos or drawings you'll need, and make it clear whether you'll provide the graphics or whether the web developer will need to do it. Graphics you may need to provide yourself would include photos of staff, photos of pictures, and other graphics the developer wouldn't be able to get for you.

10 - If you will be selling directly on the website, realize that you will need to get a merchant account that can be used on the web and/or a PayPal account to accept payments. If you have a retail storefront, don't assume your off-line merchant account can be used on the web - they often can't. Call the service provider and ask. If you don't have a merchant provider or your current provider can't handle transactions on the web, ask the developer you choose for suggestions.

11 - If you will have a shopping cart or any other database driven application on the site, work out how you want it to work (i.e., what the customer sees first, where things should be on the screen, what they do next, etc.) as much as possible and tell the programmer before they create the application. After a database application such as a shopping cart is set up, something you see as a "little change" in the way it works could be a major programming headache (and expense to you).

12 - Be sure you sign a contract that spells out all the details you have discussed with the developer.

13 - Be sure the contract gives you full copyright ownership of your site and the work done for you, so that if you decide to change web developers or hosting companies at any time in the future you will be able to do so without having to have your site recreated. The copyright ownership must be written into the contract. Otherwise, under copyright law, the developer may own the work they created for you.

14 - Review work in progress quickly. Remember the developer can't move ahead with your project until you sign off on what they've sent you to review. If you delay, they may be moving ahead with someone else's project when you finally get back to them, and may not be able to schedule your work in again for some time.