Hi, I’m Rick and welcome to Help Me with my Web Site.

In our previous episodes in web development, we covered the various types of web sites and the various ways a web site could be developed. Jump back to our previous episodes if you’d like to catch up.

How should you develop your web site. Let me ask you a number of questions that will point you in the right direction:

• What’s your budget? If your budget is small and you are not interested in being very hands on, you are forced into a template site. This is a pet peeve of mine. Please don’t go shopping for a web developer without knowing your budget.
• What functionality do you need? If you are looking for a 5 page brochure site and you like the templates available to you, an online template generator could be a perfect fit. If you will want to build a web site that is a foundation for greater growth, you might want to select another platform.
• How much traffic will you get? Everyone wants to put up a web site and have everything hit their site. That’s not usually the way it works. Your web site traffic will grow organically. However, you want to select a development method (and web hosting) that will be able to handle your best case scenario.
• What future functionality do you think you’ll need? We have often developed a very simple site for a client because they know that they will need more specialized functions in the near future. They don’t want to throw away web site number 1 to completely redevelop web site number 2. Also, you want to select a web development implementation that can handle even your wildest dreams without costly custom development (if you can help it).
• What talent do you have available? Many people like to work with people who they can physically meet with to discuss options and challenges. Sometimes, organizations select technologies that their staff knows. Just be careful. Just because you’ve built sites using familiar tools in the past does not mean that toolset is the best for you in the future.

There are a number of other intuitive and more obscure questions you could ask yourself. Sometimes, it’s worth paying a consultant to help you at this step, even if you select one of the least expensive alternatives out there. You can intelligently choose what you’re willing to pay for and what you can forego for now.

Next, we’ll explore how you can determine if you need a more customized site.