So you’ve decided to get a website for your business and you’ve found a company locally who’ll develop it for you. What are the most important things you’re going to ask them to provide on your site? The layout? The colours? The fancy flash header similar to one you saw on a website you recently came across?

Well you can ask for all those things and I’m sure your local web developer will be pleased to oblige, and charge for! But all these things are missing the point.

A good, professional design for a website is a given. You don’t want to pay money and have it look like it was designed by a 5-year old. But the key things it must do are:

• Attract visitors. That usually means being visible on search engines where people are going to find it.
• Convert those visitors to customers or customer enquiries.

If the site can’t achieve either of these things then it’s a complete waste of time and money. Sadly many web developers don’t consider these aspects when developing a site and are more concerned about showing off their design skills.

Don’t be a victim of the designers pretending to be web developers. Always ask these key questions:

• What will you do to get my site listed on search engines?
• What will you be designing into my site to persuade people to do business with me?

If they don’t have convincing answers to either of these questions then, bet your life, all you’ll be getting is a website that looks pretty but is pretty useless.