After investing the time to register a domain name for your business, taking the time to choose just the right one, now all you have left to do is find a web design company and hire them to make your business website, right? Well….not exactly. In today’s digital landscape, an effective web design is the foundation of any business’s initial marketing strategy. Your website will often be your customer’s first impression of your business, so it is important that you put a lot of thought and work into it. Here are some things to discuss with your web design team as you plan your initial meeting.

First, you should decide what the main goal of your website will be. What is the main purpose? Is your website going to primarily serve as an online brochure for your company or is it supposed to function as a lead generation page in which it needs to capture the names and email address of prospective customers? Alternatively, would you need your website to sell products or services online? Whatever your needs for your new website, it is imperative that you determine all the features you’ll need prior to beginning any discussion or work with a web design firm to avoid wasting valuable time and money just to add functionality later in the development process that you didn’t think of in the beginning stages.

Secondly, think about how much maintenance you want to do on your own website. If you are okay with having a design firm handle everything, down to writing and posting content, factor that in. If however, you want to be able to publish and edit content easily, you will want an easy to manage CMS like WordPress which will greatly effect which web design company you choose to build your website. Your decision on this matter will especially affect the technology and platform used in constructing the website, meaning, the level of your involvement in maintenance after the launch needs to be determined up front.

Additionally, you have to think about how prospective customers will find your website. Obviously you will market your domain name in ways such as business cards and other marketing collateral, however, proper coding and search engine optimization (SEO) can help your website rank highly for keywords in the search engines to increase the amount of people who come to your site. Other factors like integration with social media can give your website greater visibility so these things should certainly be discussed. Whatever methods you use to get visitors to your website, the idea is that when they get there, the site is user friendly and engaging.

Now you can put some things down on paper and reach out to a few companies for a proposal to build a great website for your company. BMGcreative is a great place when you are starting a new website – check out our Portfolio for some web design ideas or Contact Us today for a quote!