The Most Crucial Website Design Decisions You Will Need
to make in order to plan for success.
You may be on your first website. But more likely you're
faced with redesigning a website that isn't functioning as well as
it should. I see 12 vital decisions involved with developing a website,
and I want to explain them with you in mind:
 You're
the owner or marketing director of a small business and know that
getting your website to pull its share of the load is vital for success.
But your budget is severely limited!
You've
just been assigned the task of redoing your company's website. Congratulations,
now you can be blamed if things don't work well. :-)
You've
volunteered to take on your church or organization website and make
some sense out of it -- without offending the person who built it
in the first place.
This
time around you've decided to outsource the job, but you have no
idea of how to supervise a design company to make sure they do what
you need. Good luck!
I want to help. When I built my first website in 1998
at the very beginning of the commercial Web, I didn't have a clue how
to proceed. In those days there was no one to guide me. I've made every
mistake you can think of -- some more than once, I hate to admit.
Since then I've built and assisted with many online
stores and websites for all kinds of businesses and organizations.
There are twelve critical places in building a website
where you must make the right decision, or you'll have to repeat this
task again and again until you get it right. I won't be talking about
how to write HTML; I want to help you with the mindset, the basic approach.
I want to take you by the hand and lead you through the critical decisions.
The better you grasp these essential points, the better your website
will work and the happier camper you'll be.
Okay, let's roll up our sleeves and get started. By the
way, why don't you print out this article and then mark it up with
your thoughts and ideas as you read. It's designed to serve as a worksheet
to clarify your thinking and provide direction at various stages of
the project. If you decide to outsource the project, you'll want to
share a copy of your marked up worksheet with your website designer.
Print it out.
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