Don’t Let Website Problems Ruin Your Business Plan
September 20th, 2009A good online business plan can still perform poorly due to isues with website design and/or website hosting. When thinking about which design firm to hire, have some fun and play ‘website design bingo’ - we judge a ‘full house’ to be web development outfits that at least note the following issues when discussing your planned new site:-
- YOUR plan - talking specifically in terms of what your intentions are - what’s the website development company’s impression of your proposal ?
- importance of usability - website visitors are able to execute everything without thinking on the website
- accessibility - so your site can be physically accessed by everybody, with content clearly understood by the market the site is directed at
- search engine optimisation - providing your site decent rankings
- CMS (content mangement systems) - letting you add/amend/delete info on the site by oneself at any moment
- security - safety of sensitive data, with regular backups of data.
- hosting - will the web development firm host your site? If so, what about their servers? Do they use shared servers with potentially 1000s of other sites on the same server, or are they using managed dedicated servers?
- technical support and after-sales - will they be around to support your business after the site is live? How much is technical support? Do they offer site updates?
A decent web development team will inform you of the above issues, and how they tackle them.
So how to find such a web design firm in the first place? It’s better to find one in your locale, so you can meet up with them and be assured that they are also an established company with a great team to do the job well. In Google, use a search term like “web design” plus your location; for instance : website design nottingham. This will supply you with a listing of website development outfits in your area.