I have a little secret to tell you, web sites do not get made by magic. Surprised? I am. Plenty of people seem to think just that. They believe after one short conversation with a designer that a site can be “thrown together” and they will have a professional web site. It doesn’t happen that way, honest.

More often than not new web site clients are ill-prepared for the task of readying themselves for what will become a demanding task for a business owner – getting a web site made for their business. Whether your web site is going to be a standard “brochure” site (just information about your services/products) or a more robust eCommerce site, doing it right takes time, and doing it well takes just a little more time.

Web sites have become a necessity for business owners – they have become the 24/7 store or office front that you can point people to without having to be there to answer the phone or open the door. Web sites are the smartest marketing investment a business can make – you just have to be prepared to do a little work.

Why is it such a challenge to get a web site made? Consider this, who knows your business better than you? Certainly not your web designer (unless they happen to work with or for you). So why would you expect your web site designer to know everything you know and create something from scratch when they may have only just met you?

Designers need information in order to pull together just the look of a site. They need your time for interviews and questions that will need answering during the design process. This is a give and take method that can drain the reserves of even the most energetic business person – I know, I’ve seen it happen dozens of times. It’s not that we designers are stupid; we just don’t know much about welding supplies, physical rehabilitation, real estate or classic cars (insert your business here) when our expertise lies with computers and programming. Web sites come together with the combined talents of the designer and the strength of information provided by the owner(s) of the web site.

There are two keys to getting a web site up and running quickly, and possibly saving some money while you’re at it – do a little research and respond in a reasonable amount of time to your designer when they ask questions.

Know ahead of time how many pages you may want or need for your site and the information that will populate each page (this is called content). Content comes in the form of text and photos or graphics. Providing the content to your designer in a digital format either by email on a CD is the best possible way to save time and money. For photos, if you don’t have these available on disk they can be scanned by your designer.

Make sure you perform a spell-check on your content too. Even though your designer should do this, not all do, and in some cases there may be words your industry uses that are not familiar to the designer and may get changed during their spell-checking process. Be sure to make your designer aware of these words.

Now you are asking, why do I have to do all this work??? Why can’t my designer just go out on the Web and grab some content from another web site and use that? Wouldn’t that make things easier? Well sure, but it would also be illegal. The Web is a muddy place when it comes to content ownership, but one thing is for sure – if you originally wrote the text, it belongs to you by implied copyright. If your designer copies content from another site without making extreme changes to it before publishing it to the web, they are stealing the work of another individual or company and they are breaking the law. The same goes for pictures.

Then there is the eCommerce site. This site requires even more time from a business owner. An eCommerce site is operated from a database and the database holds all of the client’s products and their information. Someone has to put these items in the database and it is usually the site owner.

Shopping cart sites are usually managed by the business owner or someone in their organization, and they can demand quite a bit of time. Not only will you have to put all the products into the site’s database via the administrative panels (usually provided with a shopping cart site), but you will also have to manage the sale of these items, and the packaging and shipping as well.

Daunting as the web design process is, it is very rewarding in the end when a client or customer tells you, I found your services/products through your web site. That is when you know you made the right decision to add a web site to your marketing plan.