Checklist on what to ask your web person

02-Jan-2010

Your Problem

• You need to rebuild your website but don't know where to start?
• You want your website to get you more leads and more prospects but don't know how?
• You want to find ways to attract more customers?
• You're not sure how your website fits in with your overall sales strategy?
• You're looking for some clear, frank, advice on what you can do?
• You can't do it alone but don't know who to trust?

What you can do

How do you make sure you have the best web person for your website.  Here are some tips on how to do just that.

1. Find out who will actually be doing the work, in-house or outsourced.
   - This is important as it will affect the price and quality of the work, you can find out the reason here.
   - Look at their past clients work, if you like the work, ask to speak to a few of their clients.
   - Ask the client how the job went
   - Have their website enquiries increased and would they work with them again and why.
2. Ask your web person if they provide a strategy to attract more customers and prospects via your website
   - If you want to get the most out of your site just building it is not enough.  Do they help you with ongoing sales and marketing strategy, advice and support or do they leave you high and dry after the job is done?
3. Ask what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) they do
   - The basic SEO requirements can be found here
4. If you want to update your site regularly you would benefit from a Content Management System, ask you web person for a hands on demo to see if you can update it yourself and how easy it is to use so there are no surprises
   -  Depending on how comfortable you are with computers will determine what CMS to use.
5. What are the hosting / costs?
   - using your own hosting company can be problematic as each CMS software needs a certain minimum requirements. More and more people are moving to subscription sites that way they don't need to worry about hosting.
6. Does it come with Analytics and do you have access to them so you can see what pages are working for your clients and what are not and with a CMS you can change pages to suite
   - Analytics are important to monitor you traffic, where your users are coming from, what are you most popular pages and what are not as well as how users are navigating the site. This is valuable information and will help you improve your site.

I have put together a short article on “Common Website Mistakes”  which I hope you can avoid.

I hope this information has helped you understand the type of work your web person should be doing for you and if they are the right person for the job.  If they don't do all of the above plus give you the tools to manage your website, contact me and we can have a chat about your online business goals.