The first things people look at when choosing a web site
development company, is price, and whether their sites are
pretty. If that is all you look for in a web site, you may
be losing out on a lot of business.

First or all, price is really a non issue, so I will not
talk about that here. As business owners you understand,
it is not about price, it is about ROI.

Secondly is the part about pretty. Owning a website that
is pretty will never make you any money. You need a lot
more then a pretty site. For starters, when a potential
customer comes to your web site, are they looking to be
entertained, or to buy what you are selling?

There are a lot of web site design firms out there that
focus on pretty. They know that if they can make their
clients say "WOW - That is my web site" they can sell
more sites. They do this with little care in whether
the web site will actually help to move any product.

Rule number 1: Do not buy a site based on WOW factor.
The goal of the website is not to give something for
the webmaster to show off. The goal of the site is to
move product. The site must push the product.
- (The does not mean it can not look nice)

Rule number 2: Check the speed of the development
company's portfolio sites. As a web site owner, it
is important to remember that nearly half of your
potential clients are still on dial up internet.
Most business owners are on high speed so they do not
even realize speed is a problem. Typically a good website
will load in under 10 seconds on dial up. Under 7 seconds
is preferred. Many of the "pretty" sites of the world, or
those with flash animation take 45 seconds to 3 minutes on
dial up internet. Now if half of your users had to wait
over a minute per page to view your site, how many will
stay around to buy anything? You can check the 56K
speed at websiteoptimization.com

Rule number 3: Avoid frame sets at all costs. There
are numerous reasons that frames are bad, but all you
really need to know is that right in Googles webmaster
guidelines, it strongly recommends against using frame
sets on your site. (A frame set is easily recognized
when you can scroll with one part of the page and the
rest remains fixed)

Rule number 4: Watch out for email addresses. All new
webmasters want their email on their website. This is
a bad idea. Email addresses also present a range of
problems including user email client configuration,
spam, and lots leads. All contacts from your site should
go through a form and then properly logged to protect
you from losing anything.

These rules are not all there is to building a good
web site, but if find a company that follows these
rules, they will probably be a good company that knows
how to make a profitable web site.

Article written by Scott Alexander.