Small Business Websites That Work

By Sean McManus
Published by Prentice Hall (Pearson)

• Buy 'Small Business Websites That Work'
• Book website homepage
• Read the introduction in full
• Free chapter: Planning your website and creating the content
• Read reviews
• About the author

Resourcing your website design

It's unlikely you would employ an amateur website designer on a salary as high as yours, but that is what happens if you fail to delegate the job

At a glance:

• Chapter summary

Chapter summary

There are several ways to resource the design of your website which show a compromise between cost and control.

The best solution is to get an outside agency to do it for you unless you are investing enough to justify bringing someone into the company.

You should still aim to delegate responsibility for the website within your company and if that's impractical you need to scale the website back to something you can maintain reliably.

The checklist in this chapter can be used to ensure that you've discussed the important issues with your design team before they put finger to keyboard.

Chapter 5 shows how you can evaluate the quality of design you see in designer's portfolios and in their proposals for your own online presence.

Don't forget that as well as recruiting website designers and their equipment if they're in-house, you'll need to resource the creation of content (see chapter 2), the site administration (paperwork such as domain name renewals and secure certificates) and the site promotion (see chapter 9).

These are the subheadings in this chapter:

• Introduction
• The importance of delegation
• Getting a friend to design the site
• Outsourcing the website design to another company
• Get site designed in-house
• Getting the balance right
• What's it going to cost?
• Checklist for the brief to designers
• Summary