Guide to setting up a new website

What you need to know when creating a new website

The purpose of this guide is to give you some pointers on what you should and shouldn't do when starting a new website. Obviously the requirements for websites vary greatly - we are not going to discuss the requirements of these websites, we are going to consider the general pitfalls and advantages of setting up a new website.

Domain name

Since domain names are relatively cheap to buy, people have registered a lot of domains that they have no intention of ever using. This means that getting a domain name that in anyway resembles your company name is now becoming increasing difficult. In fact, this problem was one of the deciding factors in us selecting Method & Class as a company name - we could actually get the .com domain.

So probably the first thing you should do is register a domain name - this should be as short and memorable as you can get. If necessary, try putting in dashes (-) for spaces to create your desired company name. It's always nice to have the .com or .co.uk domain as well - it's the first thing people will look for if they know your company name.

Register domain for long periods

The reason we suggesting registering the domain for a long period is for two reasons:

1. Search Engine purposes - a domain registered for 10 years suggests you are in it for the long-term and not just using the domain to point traffic to another site, which will help boost your search engine rankings (ever so slightly!)
2. You are unlikely to change the domain name anyway, so it makes sense to secure it for a long period.

We use 123-reg.co.uk for our domain registrations, they're cheap and they offer a good service.

Define the purpose of the website

You need to decide clearly what the purpose of the website is. Is it to be a:

• Web application which ultimately 'is the business'
• Web-based shop-front for your company
• Brochure site for your company (just the who, what and where)
• Something far more complex and secretive...

The purpose of your website is going to dictate how much money you spend on it, what your measurements of success are and how much effort you are actually going to invest in putting it together. For example, if you are creating an online shop, your measurements of success are going to be how many widgets you actually sell a month and if you are profitable. If you are creating a brochure site, it's all about attracting new visitors to the site and converting the visitors into customer contacts. The measurement of these two sites in terms of raw requirements are quite different meaning you would need to approach them differently.

Design, branding, look and feel

If this is a completely new business you are probably going to need a logo or brand development to work with your website. Get this sorted before you start considering your website. It would be a huge waste of resources to put together a website and then decide you want to change your logo/brand/colour scheme after 2 weeks - trust me on this one, we went through the same process with our own site!

You want the website to be an extension of your brand; it should be a cohesive representation of your company. I personally don't like to see a brand that has become a mishmash of logos, fonts and colours. A good example of how to manage a brand properly is Guinness. For many years we worked on the Guinness Brand Library - this was a Flash-based e-learning application that basically explained what the Guinness, and later Diageo staff, could and couldn't do with the brand. It was a brilliant way of providing the definitive answers and what they can and can't do.

When was the last time you saw a Guinness advertisement that wasn't in keeping with their brand?

The design of a website is such a subjective thing it's really worth canvassing a few colleagues, friends and family to find out what other people like - after all you could be in the minority. It's important to remember to have a website designed to meet your customers needs, not your own.

Write a brief

Assuming you are not going to actually design and develop your website yourself, you will need to appoint a web design agency to scope, plan, design and build your website for you. In order to get what you want and to give the web agency every chance of delivering, it is imperative that you right a brief. Without a brief you have no indication of what you want to achieve, meaning no measurement of success. The agencies will be taking a complete stab in the dark at what you want, meaning their prices will be all over the place - some will give you a price for an all-singing-all-dancing website, whereas others will just quote for restyling some blogging software which, if budgets are a concern, will make it even harder to decide which one to choose. By supplying a brief, you are levelling the playing field and ensuring that you will get like-for-like quotes. You can then base your decision on merit and comparative price.

It's also important to put some effort into writing a brief - if you knock something up in five minutes it's going to look like it and it will reflect badly on your company. From a web agency's point of view, if you can't be bothered to spend a few hours preparing a proper, well thought out brief, then just how serious are you about the project?

Once you have a brief, you should research web agencies that you want to work with (including us :-) ) and send them your carefully prepared brief. Included in that brief should be a deadline for responses - any professional agency should be able to turn around a proposal in under two weeks. Personally, if I received a proposal back too quickly I would be concerned they hadn't fully digested my brief and perhaps hadn't spent enough time on it. You will find that any decent agency will be busy; they are busy for a reason - they're good - so you need to allow them some time to dedicate themselves to what is effectively non-paying work. Our proposals typically take a least a day to write and require a further day or two to plan and proofread, so you have to be prepared to give us some time to respond - good things are worth waiting for :-)

We have previously written a guide to writing a brief for a website - it is a good point of reference to start writing your website brief.

Deciding which agency to use

Being a web agency ourselves, we are involved in pitches all the time. We are used to being compared to other agencies so we have an idea on what wins contracts and what doesn't. From our experience the following things seem to be well received:

• Honesty
• Demonstrations of previous work
• A sound knowledge of the subject
• Being friendly and helpful - afterall, you're likely to be working together a lot over the coming weeks!

Don't be afraid of using a smaller company or an individual - they can deliver the same quality work as the big companies. The prices might even be similar. It's not only about the hours worked on the project Afterall, you are also paying for their expertise - this takes time and investment to achieve.

You will probably find that there is some disparity on quotations - if there is, ask questions and find out why. Find out how they price the jobs. Typically, we would consider the work involved and base it on an hourly rate to get a figure. There is sometimes room for manoeuvre on the price, but it usually depends on the size of the job. Obviously on a 10 page brochure site there isn't a lot of room to adjust pricing, whereas a complex web app can be altered to reduce costs.

So don't be afraid to ask questions about the prices.

So, from there on in, you're really in the hands of the agency that you have selected, so hopefully they'll be able to guide you the rest of the way.

If we can help you with any of these stages, please do not hesitate to contact us on the address or phone number below.