1. Decide why you need a website
2. Define your target upstream market and downstream market
3. Set objectives for the new website
4. Get consensus, buy-in
5. Define the scope of work
6. Define a budget
7. Setup a team: writers, technical, etc.
8. Write it down, gather it up
9. Mock-it up
10. Test
11. Design
12. Prepare new materials as needed
13. Beta
14. Launch
15. Edit as needed

Hiring a web design firm can be like buying a car without test-driving it AND not getting to look under the hood. I'll give you skinny on how to peek. The more you look, the more you'll understand.

First

The goodies that should be there: references to styles sheets, .css, visually organized, xhtml strict, divs, and compact files.

Second

The sludge that shouldn't be there: lots of embedded, inline coding, tables, javascript, lack of .css reference, lack of XHTML reference.

So what is a blog? It's shorthand for "web logs." First popularized by journalists and technorati, blogs have become increasingly popular, but are they of any value? Turns out they are!

What Would I Do With a Blog?

Blogs can promote a new idea or product inexpensively, instantly and widely.

How Does One Choose a Designer?

If you've been shopping for a website lately, you've found that they range in price from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. Then there's the dazzling array of choices of build-your-own websites. The pricing world of web design is so wild and wooly because it's very challenging to evaluate skill levels. Here are a few essential points to help you evaluate the designer you're so enamored with: