First of all do your market research, ask to see some examples of a web design companies work, generally speaking they will have a portfolio of what they have done. Next thing is get at least 3 quotes in and to make sure you get the best price. You need to be looking to get good quality for a good price. Remember just because it is the most expensive doesn’t mean that it is the best quality – they might just be over charging. In the same breathe don’t just go for the cheapest option either.

The next point is to be aware of what you are looking  for your website to do. Do you want to buy online? Or are you looking for a simple brochure website? If you are looking to sell online you will also need to consider SEO or Search Engine Optimisation for your website and  this really needs to be done each month. SEO is when somebody searches for a search term, for example web design lancashire and Google will then rank thousands of websites based on their SEO authority and content. What SEO will do is get your business ideally to the first page of Google as this is where the majority of potential customers will click and give their business too.

The top ten things any company needs to ask themselves when they set out on a web design project are the following:

1. What do you want to achieve from this web site. Do you want to sell online?

2. What is your budget to build the web site? How many pages do you want?

3. Do you want to have SEO included in your budget? What can you afford to spend each month promoting your website?

4. What is your competition doing? Can you get any ideas from them?

5. Do you have any other marketing material such as brochures already done as you will want them to match the design of your website.

6. Do you want to generate business? Do you want to just have a presence?

7. Do you want to run a Pay Per Click Campaign?

8. What search terms are popular within my market?

9. How competitive is the online market for your product or service?

10. What time scales do you want to see a return on your investment?

If you can get the answers to these questions then it will help you significantly to pick out the best web site designer and SEO engineer out there. One of the main things you need to understand is that when starting a new web project, there are so many different avenues to go down, you need to know what you want to your website to achieve before you set out.

With this may come a few problems;

1. A quicker and cheaper option is to re-skin the current website but still use the same coding. This will make the website look nice and pretty but the coding underneath the skin could be holding back it’s true potential.
2. All websites should be coded in CSS this basically means the styling of the page is controlled from another file leaving just the content. In terms of SEO this is much better but also speeds up page load time, makes the website compatible with PDAs, mobile phones.
3. If you’ve already gained great SEO results with your current website but you want new content and pages. It’s important to keep the same page structure or use the correct redirect, otherwise your content and pages will have moved leaving visitors who found you from a old link will be left with a 404 page.
4. Let your customers know if you’ve got a new design or logo. Many people recognise a logo more then a domain name. If a visitor has bookmarked your website and returns a week later and everything has changed from logo to colour scheme this could possibly have a negative effect and they could leave the site.
5. Include a blog or news page, If possible have a RSS feed. The reason for this Google loves unique fresh content this will help you gain higher ranks and also target long tail keywords. A blog or news page will also allow you to communicate with your customers and turn yourself into a authority in your niche.