Chances are, your business needs a website. It’s home base for you, regardless of how many social networks you have a presence in. It’s the place where you decide what and how to present about your business where someone else’s rules don’t apply (apart from local laws). But the chances also tell us that this critical tool for your business is a mysterious thing that you aren’t really sure of how to develop and manage. That’s what we web developers are here for.
Unfortunately, too many in our field fall short of the professionalism I’d like to see. Either they don’t understand business objectives, or how to communicate graphically, or if they have those skills, perhaps they are weak in areas of programming and functionality. And since none of of these areas is something you are a likely expert in, you are left to the wolves when it comes to choosing a development partner.
Hopefully, we can help change the latter circumstance by giving you a good “cheat-sheet” to guide your conversations and give you key information for comparing suppliers.
1. Define Your Site Project Clearly
The goal of a website development project is to have the following three elements match up as closely as possible:
- What you think you are buying
- What your website designer thinks they are selling
- What your website designer actually builds
The most important factor in a website project is allocating the time to go through the planning and discovery process. This will help you narrow the gap between #1 and #2 above. The second key is to review the process to verify that #3 above (the end product) matches #1 and #2 above. Finding a company or individual who has extensive experience in doing this will help a lot. Incidentally, the best web developers are teams of individuals who specialize in the different aspects of building great sites.
2. Setup Pricing
- Do you have a standard, published way to estimate website projects? What is it?
- Can you give me a line item breakdown of your setup fee / initial development estimate?
- How much of the total price is for graphic design work?
- How much of the total price is for functionality (software) development (includes training)?
- How much of the total price is for content (preparation and loading)?
3. Ongoing Pricing
- Can you give me a breakdown of the total cost of ownership I will have the website?
- How much am I paying for hosting?
- How much am I paying for software licensing, maintenance, and support? Is is a flat fee or hourly?
- How much I am paying for ongoing content changes? Is is a flat fee or hourly?
4. Experience
- Do you have a documented, repeatable process to plan and build websites? Give me a written overview of the process?
- Have you built websites like the one you are proposing to build for me?
- Can you provide 5 website addresses of website you built like the one you are proposing to build for me?
- Can you provide 5 references from companies you have built website for?
- How many software driven websites have you developed?
- Can you give me a list of at least 20 websites you have built?
- How will I report and track issues / trouble tickets?
- What are your office hours? How can I get issues resolved after hours?
- If you (the primary contact) decides to not do website development anymore, who will support my website?
5. Software
- How do you handle versioning of your software? Am I forced to take version upgrades? Do I have access to version upgrades?
- Who owns the Intellectual Property rights to the software in my website (note: If they are assigning the rights to you – normal logic would think that is a good thing… but in reality it is a huge red flag… in nearly every case… it means that the software will be very feature poor and that you will be the person / company forced to de-bug it)?
- Is the website portable (i.e. can I move it off of your system)? Who can host the website?
- Will I get the benefit of other customers investing in future upgrades of the software used to run my website (i.e. features added)?
- Is the software customizable (i.e. can I pay for custom modifications to the software)?
- Is the website scalable? What is involved in making changes?
If you are the least bit concerned that you won’t understand what to do with the answers when you get them, please consider giving us a call. BGAmedia offers an hour of free consulting to any prospective customer considering a website development project. Whether we get your business or not, we will be happy to advise you as to the issues that are important for your particular site. And don’t worry, we can usually fix any problems, even ones that were created by others.