Having a website built can turn into a costly project that may or may not be valuable in terms of effort and costs. Before you embark on the task, and even before you select a web designer consider about your business and what it actually wants to get from a website. Once you have some answers to this question it will give you a good idea what kind of designer (if any) you could do with and a basic overview with which to begin.

Do you just want to have your business particulars listed on the internet so that customers who already know about you can locate basic information such as your telephone number or your opening times? If this is all you really require, because your business is say for example a hairdressers shop on a high street you will almost certainly find that your needs are already taken care of by the many business directories that are now on line.

Do you wish to provide a service for existing customers, providing them with information, backing and service once they have already located you via another way. In this case your site may well need to be technically very well built, easy to revise but will require no Online Marketing to highlight it to the search engines.

You may wish to sell goods online, having a product which can be bought without been seen as it is standard, for example dvds or cds. If this is the case then investment in a website that can cope quickly and easily with payments is vital, the site will need to have a good Search Engine Placement so that a huge number of searchers are alerted to the products but the detail of the things themselves may be nominal.

If your product is a niche one, for example say you dealt in antique silver coffee pots, you may find that there is very little need for any search engine marketing as there are so few competitors for your goods on line. You may find that you as a result achieve a good enough Search Engine Placement position without paying out for the services of a SEO Company. People looking for these niche items are ready to browse through a few more search engine results pages than they would for a commodity. Nonetheless if you expect to get business from the site you will have to consider very carefully about how you present information about your items, you will probably need access to a designer who gives a cost effective ongoing service to keep the information updated and also a decent photographer as images will be vital.

Try to consider about which of these examples would best match your business and then choose your designer on that basis, if you still require one!