Return to the Blog.

TWO QUESTIONS TO ASK A WEBSITE DEVELOPER

You can spend lots of money on a website that looks beautiful - but which produces few leads and sells no projects. Not all web developers consider measurable performance to be part of their job. Often their primary training is in graphic design and they focus only on producing a handsome online brochure. But they don't think about traffic and performance. Other vendors specialize in optimizing website design with the goal of producing measurable results. The trick, as always, is to know the difference. If you can define clear measures of successful performance, you can select a vendor that will meet your needs.

But how can you define and measure what you don't understand to begin with? Isn't that the reason you hire an outside consultant? The answer is to start with what you do know, and to do your due diligence in these two areas:

(1) What you do know is your client -- and the terms and language your client uses to express his or her concerns. These are the keyword phrases your client is putting into the search engines. These are the phrases for which you want your website to come up on the first page of Google results. Before you select a vendor, test those keyword phrases, and multiple variations, in Google, and record the exact results. This provides you with a clear benchmark for the performance of your existing website. Ask your prospective vendor what improvement you can expect in these rankings from their website upgrade.

(2) What you also know (or can easily discover) are the number of visitors who come to your current website every month and the number of pages that each of them sees. This activity is recorded in your server logs and displayed in a simple table. Copy these tables to your desktop in order to establish a second quantitative benchmark of your existing website's performance. Again, ask your prospective vendor what kind of increase you can expect, and when, from their website upgrade.

I'm sure you've seen an "expert" tripped up on facts in areas where you have personal knowledge. Do your due diligence described above and then apply this knowledge critically to what the web "experts" tell you. By having facts about the keyword performance of your current website (and that of your competitors), along with your goals for performance improvements, you'll be able to distinguish between consultants who merely want to make pretty pictures and visual tricks online versus those who will deliver improvements in measurable results from your website.