The Birth of a Website Getting Started

So you’ve surfed the web, used Yahoo, maybe even bought a book on Amazon but you’ve never actually been involved in building a website. Where do you begin?

• Who is the primary audience for this site (e.g. potential customers)? Are there any secondary audiences you would like to address (e.g. potential staff, current customers, competitors)?
• What would this audience want to see on the website? Do they really need to see an org chart of your company? Or do they primarily want product info? Is this an opportunity for them to get to know the company history or ethos?
• How interactive do you want the experience to be? Will the user be asked to enter any of their personal details? Do you want to start an email mailing list? Will you be calculating their net worth? Will you be offering selected content only to registered users?
• Are you selling anything online? Remember, selling online requires much more than a shopping cart: What form of payment will you accept? Will you be able to weigh and measure the dimensions of every product for shipping? Who will manage the distribution and fulfillment end of the sale? Who will process the orders within the company? How much will you charge? Will your product be a viable online options e.g. books are a more sensible online product than puppies?
• How will you keep the content fresh? For normal brochureware, we find Contribute to be a great simple tool for updating text and images on websites. Will you have some dynamic content such as a stock report feed (such as the one on the right hand side of our home page)?
• What kind of look and feel are you looking for? Everyone in the world wants their website to be “funky but corporate”. Talking about design is like trying to describe why you find your spouse attractive – it is a tricky linguistic battle because two people may have very different ideas of what “funky” and “corporate” mean. Even “classy” has variable definitions. The best way to describe design to a graphic design is through examples. Trawl the web for websites you like. You might like certain elements or colour schemes of some. Make a list and present it with your Request for Proposal.
• Who’s the boss? Make sure someone is given ownership of the website within your organization. Without this, things tend to go haywire and waste a lot of time in committee and – in our opinion – don’t tend to come out as well as those which are enacted under a clear single vision.
• Do you have a domain name? Do you want a regional domain such as .bm or .co.uk? Or would you rather go with the granddaddy of all domains and get a .com?
• Do you have a website hosting service? A website and a domain name each have to “live” somewhere i.e. they have to be saved onto a machine called a web server and a name server respectively which enable them both to be accessed on the internet. If you do have a website hosting service, then you will need to garner the FTP details which are the details your web company (hopefully us) will need in order to copy your website onto the web. If you don’t have a website hosting service, we can recommend our own secure, stable and robust hosting service.
• OK. So you’ve spent the past week or so going blind looking at competitor websites and noting all the things you like and don’t like about websites and what you want on your own website and you are about ready to hurl your computer out the window. What now?
• Prepare a brief of everything you have gathered and present it to a web company (again, hopefully us). We will consult with you on pricing and timescales and help fit as much as possible into your budget. We will then create a proposal describing all of this in detail. If you agree the proposal then we issue a contract called a Statement of Work which sets out a fixed-scope and fixed-cost for the project at hand. In this world where over half of IT projects go over budget, you can rest easy knowing that what is written on that piece of paper is all you will pay. Your boss will thank you too. Which is always nice.

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Required Reading