When deciding to hire a company to build a website for your company, you need to remember a few key ideas.

1. Your company image is at stake.

If you want your brand to retain it’s positive feeling in your community and with your customers, don’t put together a cheap website, or a website you built yourself.

More and more, people want the best prices regardless of quality. Having a positive brand image in the mind of your customer will allow you to charge what your product or service is worth. If you drag your image through the mud with an unprofessional website, you won’t be able to get anything out of “price shoppers”.

2. What do you want?

Many web developers know exactly what they want you to have. They will give you a website based on their recommendations without regard to what you want. If you don’t care about your website, that approach will be great for you. However, if you know what goals your website should accomplish, look for a developer that will work with you on reaching a common goal; a successful website for you, no matter how you define success.

If your web developer doesn’t ask you questions about what you want in a website, find a new web developer.

3. Make an attempt.

If you’re website designer is using terms and acronyms that don’t make sense to you, ask him to explain. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by becoming educated on the process, and he will appreciate you trying to understand the steps it takes to put a website on the internet.

4. Don’t forget marketing!

If you build it, they won’t come. Not on the internet. Unlike a storefront, your website won’t get people driving by, and the local newspaper won’t do a feature story on your new location. In fact, nobody will know you exist.

After building your website and getting it online, you need to plan a marketing strategy, set a goal, and have a realistic budget.  If you want to sell 15 used cars per month online, a $500 budget isn’t going to get that done.  However, you don’t necessarily need to spend $50,000 every month either.  Talk to your designer about marketing.  If he is an experienced marketer and is willing to work with you, ask him how much you need to spend per month (in addition to what he charges you) to meet or exceed your monthly goals.

Keeping those 4 points in mind while choosing a company to work with will save you a lot of time and trouble in the long run!