If you are looking at making changes to your website or creating a new one for a new product line, there are quite a few options available for you in the marketplace. One of the best ways to build your requirements properly is to take a look at design firms that integrate both marketing and design into their services. The primary reason for this is that web marketing companies that excel at promoting your site that have a design staff may actually bring you better results for your dollar than other alternatives.
Beyond looking at a specific type of company, there are also several other features that can be considered important when you go to build a website with a partner. Here are some options that web design teams should be offering you:
SEO marketing results:
Not every web design company ends up being an SEO company as well. By the same token, if you are including them as a potential partner, they should have agreements with SEO companies so that they can provide that service to you seamlessly if you require it. Ultimately, if you can find a company that has a strong background in Internet marketing like bluehatmarketing.com, click here for a detailed explanation, you should end up with an opportunity to post very strong results.
E-commerce capability:
Shopping cart concepts are one of the oldest applications on the Internet. It has been only recently, however, that they have become integrated with ERPs and CRMs that are available for commercial use without having to pay an exorbitant fee. If you decide that you need shopping cart features, make sure that your partner offers you several options so that you can pick the one that is best for your firm.
The most common options are:
- They build a new server for ecommerce themselves.
- They integrate an existing server that is open-source or needs a licensing fee paid.
- Your partner uses an outside cloud partner that provides the ecommerce component.
Most customers that are not Fortune 500 company size choose to use a partner that either integrates an existing server or uses an outside cloud partner. The existing server will save you money on licensing- but be cognizant that hosting fees can be exorbitant for technologies that don’t optimize memory usage. When you use an outside cloud partner, the primary benefit is that they likely aggregate their sales requests to online merchant partners like Visa, giving you a chance to pay like 1.5 percent a transaction instead of the 2 or 3 percent rate you likely will receive when you get a discount from traditional sources.
Easy update access:
Another area that is important to many firms is the backend access that they arrange for when their site is being built. If your company wants to have its own content people logging on and making changes, it is nice to have a WordPress-like back end that is modular and allows you to create exactly what you need to. If your people are constantly accessing a company store that is online, using an Odoo-like back end can allow you to change the products and pull all of the data that you need in order to be successful as a company.
Connectors:
In addition to having access to your website so that you can make wholesale changes, you should also be able to have all of your data flow from your website connected to your internal systems so that you always know exactly what your status is. Building a connector so that your systems communicate is a pretty important step to include in the requirements. It should negate the need for your staff to do data exports and imports manually.
Looking for a website design partner and finding the right one can make a large difference for your company and your career. If you insure that their capabilities match what should be on your requirements list, you will likely save yourself time and money.
