So your company has finally decided to take the plunge and either put up your first website or revamp the old one designed by your account manager's nephew. In this age of modern technology, windows and mouses, this would seem to be an easy thing to do. Just contact a local web design firm, tell them what you want, and get on with it, right? Not quite.
The most important decision you will have to make is which web design company you will get to develop your site for you. If you choose the wrong one you could even end up like one company I talked to recently - hoping their fourth choice was better than those responsible for the previous three aborted attempts. Luckily there are few basic things you can do to improve the odds.
The first and most important of these is to develop a "site brief" to give prospective web design companies. In this brief you should provide a few paragraphs about what your company does, samples of company logos and colours, describe your target audience and provide a summary of site features. Unless you are doing something special or you are a very large company, three or four pages of information should be ample.
Once you have a site brief, the next step is to identify a few different companies to give the brief and then make a presentation to you. An initial list of companies offering web design or Internet solutions can easily be found in an online directory or search engine. www.yahoo.com and www.google.com are good examples of these.
You should then narrow the list down to about four or five companies that appear to suit your needs. This is best done by checking their websites and portfolios or by asking friends or associates if they have ever dealt with any companies in your list.
Check your list of companies carefully as in Thailand it is quite common to find web design companies with great graphic and marketing ability, but poor or non-existent technical skills. If a web design company only charges by the page and doesn't mention any kind of database or programming technology then it is likely that they will struggle to complete anything more than a plain "brochure-ware" type website.
After each company has made their presentation to you, it is advisable to discuss the brief in more detail with them. Most good companies will have many questions to ask you and will probably come up with a few suggestions for your consideration as well. Listen carefully as the better companies will often give you a lot of free advice. The more information you can give to them, the better their quote will be.
One cautionary point - be wary of companies suggesting features of little or no value to your target audience. Often these are just downloaded for free, not well understood by the developers and your company is charged for the "development". The most common examples of these are probably chat-rooms and excessive use of slow to download flash effects. For a corporate site, more targeted forms of interaction such as web based inquiry forms, helpdesk systems or a press release section are more appropriate.
The final phase of choosing your web design or Internet solution provider company is to review the quotations which they should prepare as a result of the receiving your briefing. Depending on how much money you plan to spend, some companies will even provide a mock-up of what your site will look like when it is complete. A lot of work goes into producing a quote and mock-up, so generally they are a good indicator of the quality of work to follow.
Due to the variation in features, technologies and quality the quotations you receive may vary widely in value. Often the cheapest quotation may not represent the best value or quality of work however. For example, a proposal that includes a database and tools allowing you to upload your own content may cost more initially but could provide considerable long term savings if you update your site frequently.
A good quotation should itemize all the different features and associated costs, and most companies will be quite happy to revise the quotation if you wish to add or remove such features to adjust the price to your budget. Be suspicious of companies that discount the price without adjusting functionality, as the quality or delivery time may suffer as a result.
By using the process above you should be able to narrow down which company is most likely to produce the best result. Although it is impossible to completely eliminate the chance of failure, at least you can at least reduce the risk. Who knows - you might even end up completing four successful sites in a row and with the same company. Stranger things have happened.
