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Girl Geek Speaks Newsletter

Welcome to the March 2003 Issue of our newsletter for the technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We feature articles to help guide you through the process of designing, building, and promoting your business or personal web site. If you know someone who may like getting these newsletters, feel free to forward it to them in its entirety, or have them sign up for their own copy below.

In this issue
Top 10 Questions to Answer Before Hiring a Web Site Designer
Web site of the Week

Top 10 Questions to Answer Before Hiring a Web Site Designer

The main cause of web site design overrun is poor planning and last minute changes. Here are the top 10 things you should know BEFORE you talk to a web designer.

1. Do I really need a web site?

While I personally agree with Entrepreneur magazine, that you're not a business until you have a web site, not all businesses and organizations need a web site IF your prospective and current customers do not have internet access. Duh! This seems obvious, but is often overlooked.

2. What is the purpose or function of the web site?

This is crucial information for the web designer who will help you achieve the right look, add the right features and options to achieve your purpose. Are you selling, educating, informing, promoting? Goods or services or both? I have my clients write a 2-3 sentence "mission statement" for their web site before we do anything else.

3. Who is your ideal site visitor?

Defining your target market is a basic step. You need to know what you site visitor wants to see on your web site and give that to them on the homepage. You have only about 10 seconds to capture and keep their attention.

4. Will you promote your site to a regional or national audience?

The answer to this question will help the web designer to know if they need to optimize your site for search engines to reach a national market.

5. What domain name(s) would you select?

Some people register more than one, then have them all redirected to the same site.

Choose something

• easy to spell and remember
• that is descriptive of your business or organization
• that does NOT contain "special characters" like "~, _ -" (search engines don't recognize these)
• that is NOT a monogram of your name, unless it's already a well known entity

6. What "look" or "feel" do you want to convey to your site visitors?

I recommend having you surf the net for your competitors web sites and send them to me- telling me what you like and don't like. It's also a good way to do a comparative market analysis to see how we can make your business stand apart.

7. Do you already have a corporate or company image (logo, artwork, font styles, and layouts?) in your other marketing materials? If so, do you want to continue that in the web site or do something completely new?

8. What is your budget?

Consider the cost of web site design, then add on web hosting, domain name registration, submission to search engines, and web site promotion.

9. What is your timeline for completion?

I'm pretty fast in getting a simple web site together, but there may be things I'll need to learn/research on yours. I'll try to accommodate your timeline, but as with all computer stuff, unexpected glitches sometimes occur.

10. How will you keep visitors coming back to your web site?

You may wish to offer

• Changing content
• Opt-in email newsletter
• Customer surveys
• Information vital to your customers
• Autoresponders

Web Site of the Week: http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/ - learn to build good websites by looking at bad one.

DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS:

The above material is copyrighted, but you may retransmit or distribute it as long as not a single word is changed, added, or deleted, including the contact information. However, you may not copy it to a web site. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.

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