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What are the goals of the web site?
Most people automatically seem to say "sell more" but that isn't necessarily the case. A web site can have many different purposes. Some of the most effective web sites do not sell anything. Instead, they simply provide information and support for the customer, both before and after the purchase.

If you are looking to increase sales, you should decide what your priorities are. Are you looking to increase the sales of a particular product or line? Do you intend these sales to be local, national or international? Web sites are more effective when your business can offer something others can't, whether this is a unique product, lower prices, or better service. Not everyone can have the lowest prices or an exclusive product, but no one else has your location. The Internet may be a world wide medium but many businesses simply use a web site mainly to increase awareness among potential local customers.

Think about the relative priorities of these goals: -Supplement a current marketing plan
-Provide information
-Convey a particular message
-Create/supplement an corporate identity
-Increase sales
-Attract new customers
-Enhance service to existing customers
-Keep within budget

Who are your customers?
Once you have an idea of the site goals, it's time to look at your customers. What audience do you need to attract to achieve these goals? Think about age, education, location, etc. Try to think of yourself as the customer. What do you believe visitors will be looking for when he visits your site? Can you provide content that meets their expectations?

What do you want the site to include?
All commercial web sites should have, at a minimum, a paragraph or two describing the business, what it has to offer, and contact information. Ideally, you should have all five types of contact information: phone, fax, e-mail, mail, and in person, as well as business hours. Most web sites also have pictures or descriptions of the products and services offered. You should think about how detailed you want these descriptions to be.

Do you want to sell online? Will you need shopping cart software? Feedback forms? Multimedia? Any other special items?

Who is your competition?
Take a look at your competition. Be sure to look at competitors on the Internet as well as the business down the street who may not have a web site. Analyze their strengths and weakness. What can you do better?

What is your budget?
The budget sets an upper limit on what you can achieve. If you have $500 to spend, you cannot expect a large multi-page site with multimedia and e-commerce. Also remember that you also need to budget for set-up, hosting, maintenance, and marketing. If you want your own domain name, you should set aside at least $350 for the first year.

For a multi-page site, you should consider $1000 a bare minimum budget for design and the first year of maintenance. $2000 is probably more realistic.

Where will the content come from?
Will it be generated in house? Will it come from brochures of your suppliers? Who will write the copy? How often will the site need to be updated?

What is your production schedule?
You can expect most projects to take four to eight weeks, even from the largest web firms. Since much of our business is seasonal, the turnaround time varies throughout the year. In most cases, we spend more time waiting on content or feedback from the client than we do actually working on the project.

What about customer service?
Some web sites generate a lot of inquiries. In our experience e-mail accounts for more than half of these inquiries. Who is going to handle the incoming and outbound e-mail? How will an increase in telephone calls affect your current operations?

How are you going to measure success?
Sometimes customer contacts from a web site are easy to measure. If you receive an e-mail to a web only address, it's safe to assume the contact was generated from the site, whether directly or indirectly. Likewise, if a telephone call comes from someone 800 miles away, the call is probably from a web site visitor. With new walk-in customers it is harder to judge how they found you. It could be the web site, a friend, a neighbor, the Yellow Pages, or they were simply driving by.

It is also important to look at the number of visitors to your web site and what they are looking at. The simplest way to do this is with a counter. Many of our clients have asked for counters on their pages. We will add them, but we feel that counters are not a reliable indication of traffic. Visitors can enter your site through any page and may never see the page with the counter on it. Their visit won't be counted. Unless you use a type of counter not normally visible to the average visitor, we also feel that they look somewhat unprofessional. There are three basic types of page counter.

A graphical counter is probably the most common and it is usually placed on the main page. Most hosts support some type of a graphical counter. When a visitor requests a page, there is an image tag that calls on a small script to return an image of the current count, adding one each time the image is requested. Visitors who have automatic image loading turned off or click on a link too quickly will not load the counter and not increase the number.

A text counter is similar to a graphical counter in that it calls on a small script to return a number, but the data is returned very quickly and in text format. Everyone who visits that page will increase the counter increment, regardless of whether they are loading images on the page. The same problems apply as in a graphical counter if the visitor never sees the page with the counter on it. These seem to be the most accurate type of counter. In our experience, they overcount the actual number of visitors to the page with the counter by less than 20%. The amount of visitors missed will depend on the size of the site and number of pages with counters.

A JavaScript counter can use either graphics or text. They are fast, reducing problems with impatient visitors who leave a page before it is fully loaded. However, many people turn off JavaScript when on the Internet and there are still millions of people using browsers which are not capable of executing JavaScript.

The best way to track visitors to your web site is to use the server logs. These logs track every request for a file, the IP address of the visitor, the time, and the result of the request. Sometimes they will also record the referring document (the link the visitor followed to get to that page or file). By analyzing these logs, it is possible to see the page by which each visitor entered the site, what they looked at, and the page from which each visitor left the site.

Most hosting packages will at least allow access to the raw logs and many provide utilities to analyze these logs at little or no extra cost, although features vary. At the least, you should be able to view a list of the most requested files, a breakdown of visitors by time and date, and the number of either visitors (unique IP addresses) or visitor sessions (all the files requested by a visitor within a certain period of time is one session). Either of these last two will be a much more accurate indication of traffic than any counter. 

Homework.
Before they start work, any web development firm will probably ask you to do a little homework. If they don't, go somewhere else. To sell your business, they need to know your business. In addition to the considerations listed above, you should spend some time on the Internet. Find several sites that represent businesses similar to yours, are similar in size or content, contain features you would like, or just have a design that appeals to you. It is also a good idea to compile a list of questions you will have. We have clients with all levels of experience. Some have been on the Internet for years, and some have yet to send their first e-mail. They all have questions. We still haven't seen a stupid one.

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