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Web Site Design

While some wildly successful enterprises have been hatched as a mere sketch on a restaurant napkin, most new entrepreneurs are forced to slog through a long, tedious planning process to avoid costly mistakes. Although your web site may seem like a small element of an elaborate business, particularly one that's already achieved success offline, beware of the tendency to sketch out a quick plan and leave the thinking to the site developer.

In-House Development or Outsourcing?
Outsourcing your web site development can seem quite expensive. It can also seem slow and cumbersome, especially when you're ready to launch and start raking in profits.

Developing your web site in-house has some distinct advantages:

You're in complete control of the content.

You can make changes as you go.

Your ideas are secure.

Your subject matter experts can communicate easily with the developer.

You can trust your own employees to make decisions that are good for the company.

Your own people understand the business better than outsiders.


Of course, in-house development has its downside:

• Pulling current employees away from their current jobs affects everyone's workload.
• Your employees may not have the range of skills and experience needed for the job.
• Hiring new employees to build and maintain your web site on a full-time basis can cost more than you'd anticipated.
• You have to purchase equipment and software tools for your employees to do the job.
• Costly errors, missed deadlines and unanticipated problems become your responsibility.

If you already have a great deal of experience in web site development, then you can seriously consider managing your own project. Otherwise, you should check prices for outsourcing your project. Keep in mind, though, that you'll still need some in-house expertise to maintain and upgrade your site.

Planning Your Web Site
Whether you're developing your web site in-house or outsourcing the project, you should begin with a good plan. This is a good time to invite input from your company's principles and advisors and — few companies ever think to do this — representative clients or customers.

You've probably done a lot of planning just to launch your company, so we won't give you a planning primer here. But this checklist should help you put down on paper the key elements of a good web site development plan:

• Set a goal for the site. You might be surprised at how challenging this can be. Include a few concrete objectives.
• Identify your audience and geography. Is your product or service aimed at elderly women or teenagers? Do you plan to ship your widgets worldwide, or are you restricting shipping to within 50 miles of your warehouse?
• List the strategies you plan to use to attract your customers and keep them coming back. Will you be doing cross-selling, surveys, newsletters, volume discounts, or viral marketing?
• Who will maintain your site? Can updates be done by your receptionist, or will you need a full-time webmaster? Does this person have to take photos, compose text, adjust code or communicate with the west hosting service?
• Prepare a page breakdown. Give the developer the scope of the project. This part of your plan is important to avoid a phenomenon called "scope creep," in which last-minute ideas are added until the project becomes so large and expensive that it loses its focus.
• Identify the developer(s) and all personnel needed to support the web site.
• Prepare a budget that outlines all development and maintenance costs.
• Outline a schedule. Communicate deadlines to all the stakeholders.

Estimating the Costs of Developing Your Web Site
Once you have a plan, you have the specs you'll need to get an estimate for the costs of your site. You'll have no trouble finding a wide range of prices from various vendors. The less expensive quotes you'll receive will require a compromise, though, so beware of bargain basement prices.

Several vendors have templates into which they can pour your content. The look and feel of the site will be quite generic, and you'll have little control over the placement of objects on the page. Be aware of extra costs to add the customization you should have specified in the first place.

Keep the quality-cost-time triangle in mind. You can lower your costs and get your site done quickly, but you'll compromise on quality. Alternately, you can lower your costs and get pretty good quality, but you may have to wait some time to get it.

Designing and Producing a Web Site
If you have experience with web site production, you don't need a list of what you have to do to produce a web site. If you don't, this is a list of the information your developer will need from you in order to design produce a site for you:

• Your in-house liaison or project manager.
• Your subject matter expert(s) or SMEs. That is, when the time has come to enter the content, who will do the writing or specify the information? Who will answer questions about placement, errors or function? Who will approve the final version?
• The technical features you'll need, such as security, disk space, bandwidth, e-mail, chat rooms, forums, a customer help desk, database management, search functions, video, audio and many others.
• Basic site architecture requirements to guide the design of the site's navigation, outside links and other features that make the site easy to use. This includes access by blind people through their text readers.
• The graphics, photographs, video files and/or audio files that will be used in the site.
• Specific fields needed for any database records. For example, if you sell shoes, you'll need basics for each catalog entry: a photograph of the shoe style, its price, sizes, a text description, etc. But you also have to decide whether you'll show a picture of a brown shoe and let the customer pick a color or whether you want a picture of the shoe in each color (brown, tan, black and navy).
• Your policies such as privacy, security, returns and agreements. If your business is recruiting writers, for example, you'll need a statement about copyright and ownership of creative works.

Launching Your New Web Site
Before your project is finished, you'll have to make sure your web site does all that you intended it to do. Of course, you'll navigate through the site, checking that everything works well, but the site isn't for your use: it's for your customers. Your best approach is to recruit several potential customers or clients and provide them with a list of questions such as:

• Did all the links work properly?
• Did you have a sense that the site was written for you — your sex, your age group, your socioeconomic group?
• Was it easy to use?
• Did you have to wait for any pages to load?
• Does any part of the site look crowded or confusing?
• Did you have any navigation problems? Could you tell where you were at any given time?
• Was the text easy to read? Did the information flow well?
• Were you satisfied when you placed an order or did you have to compromise?

In addition to the customer test, someone in-house should do a final check of all text, pictures, links, video and audio.

Web Site Design and Branding
Brand name recognition is a critical goal in the development and growth of an online business. The field is crowded. How will you stand out? How will you build trust?

Building your brand online is vastly different from the marketing typically used to build brand offline. While billboards, TV and radio ads, mail campaigns and other traditional strategies also apply to internet-based businesses, your web site is the key to your brand. It's a visual, physical representation of who you are. That's why the design and maintenance of your web site are critical. If it fails to represent you and your products and services well, then it fails in its mission.

Here are some features that should guide the design of your web site if you want your brand to suggest a positive association in the hearts and minds of customers and clients:

• B is for bold: Your site is visual and concrete. Does it convey what you do or sell in ways that appeal to the gut of the viewer? Is your logo eye-catching, and does your company name appear on every page, or are viewers left wondering who owns this site? The ultimate in branding has been achieved when the name of an everyday item takes on the brand name: "Hand me a Kleenex, will you?" or "Put that back in the fridge!" (short for Frigidaire). In those days, ubiquity promoted visibility. In the internet environment, the opposite tends to happen: you'll achieve brand recognition because people come face to face with your web page every time they type "widget" in their browser search box. Bold, though, doesn't mean kitschy. We're not suggesting neon colors, flashy banners and aggressive messages. Bold gets attention because it gets the viewer's attention for some reason. What will your reason be?
• R is for reliable: Once you have your customer's attention, you'll have to prove yourself. Think cars and safety: Volvo! Think kitchen storage: Tupperware! Think of clothing that lasts forever: Levi Strauss! Your website will inspire confidence in your product or service if you provide quality. You also have to back up that quality with prompt responses, timely fulfillment, rapid troubleshooting and great communication.
• A is for appealing: Have you ever heard someone describe a hideous pink color as, "Pepto Bismal pink?" Now that's brand recognition! While the thought of an upset stomach isn't appealing, the solution certainly is, and people associate the color with the product more than they do a chalky taste or a thick liquid. How will your product or service appeal to your audience? Decide what emotions you wish to tap into. Do you want your brand name equated with serenity or excitement? Practicality or risk-taking? Durability or disposability? Your site should speak to the emotions associated with your brand.
• N is for new: When you launch a brand, you're either doing something completely new (like e-Bay, Priceline, PayPal or Napster) to fulfill a new need, or you're asking people to abandon a favorite, reliable brand to give yours a try. How do you plan to earn that trust? What features of your site communicate how competitive your products or services are? Will you use testimonials, comparison charts or competitive pricing? When you see how quickly visitors leave your site, you'll understand how challenging it is to give them a reason to stick around.
• D is for distinctive: You can't make all your competitors disappear overnight, so you should have a plan for making your brand distinctive. "The Ritz" is synonymous with luxury hotels, but Holiday Inns are distinctive in their appeal to traveling families with pets. A Rolex is the (here it comes again) Cadillac of watches, but more of us sport the reliable, affordable Timex. Sony ruled with the Discman, but iPod ripped through the portable music market like a Tasmanian devil. Do you have a unique niche for your product or service? Is there a feature that you offer that no one else has with their products or services? Build your web presence around those features. Don't wait until your customers discover these features for themselves. Tell them what it is, boldly and clearly.

There it is: your site is bold, reliable, appealing, new and distinctive: it's got BRAND written all over it.