How to buy a website
Written by Lasse Gejl 1385 days ago in category: web-design
You’re on the look-out for a website, but you have no clue where to start. Allow me to introduce the quick guide on “How to buy a website”.
Do you actually need a website?
Before you actually decide to hire somebody to develop a website it’s important that you answer some crucial questions:
- Why do I need a website?
- What is the goal of the website?
- Who is my target group?
Only a few companies have no use of a website, because there can be very different reasons to build and maintain an effective website. It could be that you want to:
- Sell something online (duh!)
- Advertise for your real-life product/business
- Improve your customer service
- Have a business card online
Customers like effective
No matter the reason you would want to define the purpose of the website before you go rush out and buy something pretty.
What about content?
Potential customers look for quality content. If your website is all wrapping and no content – it won’t be effective. This means that you as a company have to invest some man-hours in defining which kind of content are important to put online. After that – you will want to create the content.
Don’t underestimate the workload of creating good content.
Content management
A website is not a one-time expense, but an on-going investment. At least it ought to be. After you’ve spend weeks creating relevant content for your website, you will hopefully want to develop it further.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How often will I update the website?
- Who is going to maintain the website?
Depending on your answers you’ll have different options:
- If you have updates several times a week and you want different people to manage them, you usually need to invest in a Content Management System(CMS). A CMS is a piece of software installed on your server, which will let you make updates through a browser login in a Office-like environment. CMS software can be fitted to maintain both a simple website or a complex website with thousands of pages.
- If you only update the website a few times each month it can very well be a better solutions to have someone skilled do it for you. Usually it’s the company/person who build the website.
Technical stuff to worry about
Things are going to get a bit technical now. I want to take you through some boring stuff, but it’s rather important.
This should be in your contract
When you find a possible supplier of your new spectacular website, you’ll need to ask them to promise that the website will be:
- Standards compliant. It must validate against the regulations from World Wide Web Consortium.
- Functioning and pixel perfect in the majority browsers meaning at least Internet Explorer 6+ and Mozilla Firefox.
- Accessible to minorities e.g. people using screen readers, mobile devices etc.
- Search engine friendly. All pages must have individual name and title, and the text content must be wrapped semantically correct.
You might want to add that you also want a website, which is easy to use and looks great.
How much does a website cost?
As any other product a website vary in quality and price. Naturally you want to throw as little as possible after a website project. Or maybe not.
You’re not spending. You’re investing
It’s important to define your objectives with the website, and they should preferly match your budget in some way. When establishing your budget it’s of equal importance to remember that a website should not be considered an expense but an investment with a revenue e.g. in the form of:
- Direct increase in sale.
- Better service to existing customers.
- People signing up for your newsletter.
- General higher level of awareness of your company.
This means that you have to set your budget in accordance to your goals. Which you – by the way – defined in the beginning of this article.
And also – if you’re actually on the look-out for an effective website, you could try calling this guy.
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