Last one year as a consultant, I have been working with several companies and individuals and some of the work has been in helping non tech companies get a web presence or improve their existing web presence. I have seen that in general these companies go for a neat looking website which is a disaster otherwise. They certainly don’t know this and have no way of helping it. They do what they do well and web design is not one of them.

I have come up with a list of few things that I think one should go through before hiring someone to do a website for them. In case you are hiring a consultant or a company to do it for you, you can use this list to negotiate a contract with these people and make sure you get something in the end that adds real business value to your company.

Think of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

There are a few ways people reach your website

• You hand them your business card and then they checkout your website
• They know your company but not the website and google for you and find you
• They have a need, don’t know you and look up on the net for someone who can satisfy that need

If you are getting a website done to help you get new contracts or order, you need to make sure that enough people can find you on the internet. Case #1 and #2 above are easily taken care of. Its case #3 which takes a lot of effort and a well planned out website. Lets say you run “Swamy courier company” in Bangalore and you want to get new customers through the internet. It would be very easy for people to find your website if they search for ‘Swamy courier company bangalore’ (this is case #2). It would be much harder for them to find you if they search for ‘courier company bangalore’ (case #3).

So how do you make sure that you can be found easily on the internet? You need to make sure that your website not only looks appealing but is also search engine optimized. For this the contractor has to sit with you and understand your business (and terminology) and your customers and write content for the website that is optimized for search engine and your business. Some of the common mistakes here are

• Flash based website
• Doing website development first and then thinking of SEO

If you already have an existing website and want to do a quick check, look at the titles of your website (Thing that shows in the blue bar of firefox or internet explorer on any page). If your titles are like ‘Home’,'Welcome to Swamy Courier’, ‘Contact us’, ‘Our services’ then you have a bad website (SEO wise). These are generic titles. You should rather have titles like ‘Swamy Courier: Cheap courier service in Bangalore’ etc. You get the idea right?

Think of Design

And not just cosmetic design. Think a little bit of how the website has been made. In general avoid table based designs and ask for CSS based designs (yea .. do that .. even if you don’t understand what that really means). It may not look useful now but if you ever want to modify your website, you would really find it tough to maintain a table based design. You would end up paying more and wasting more time as those designs are very brittle and unflexible. Here are a couple of more things to avoid

• Flash based navigation menus (Right click on fancy stuff to check if its flash)
• Javascript based navigation menus (bad for SEO)

Get cheap and good hosting for website and email

[This section applies mostly to Indian companies]

If you thought hosting in India would be cheap, you are wrong. I have seen a lot of web development firms hosting websites in Indian datacenters and they suck bigtime. They charge you a lot (Rs 5000 or so for 100MB – 1 GB space and 5 – 10 email addresses) and have very bad service. More often than not, you can’t host a blog or any database driven website (shopping cart for example) on these hosts. Ask your design firm to get you an account on Dreamhost or other cheap US hosts that are very flexible.

Don’t ever host your emails with Indian hosting companies. Try to use google apps. With dreamhost you get a one click setup for google apps now. Its super cool and you get calendar, chat and everything for your domain!

I hope this post helps you in getting a good website for your company that helps you in getting more business. If you have any questions or experiences to share, please leave them as comments

So this is my another new blog

Last one month or so has been a lot of experimentation in terms of webhosts. I tried godaddy.com, dreamhost and hostingrails.com. Here is my take on all of them. Again this is just a personal viewpoint and may/may not apply to other people. Depends what you are looking for. In general I feel there are lots of hosts and one can always find out what they are looking for. It however helps to know for sure what you are looking for (lots of webspace vs speed vs support for some language/platform and ofcourse how much you are willing to spend)

Godaddy:

They I think are one of the big players however I found it very surprising that they do not give shell access in any of their shared hosting plans. This may be of importance to a lot of people, so be sure. In terms of speed etc, they are fine. Also I think they are good for domain registrations etc. I got a domain for $7.17 or something through them. Like other hosts, they do give you a lot of softwares that can be installed by a single click

Dreamhost:

These guys are quite big too and for the money that you pay, you cannot find more space and more bandwidth easily anywhere else. They give shell access and have a great control panel but the only drawback may be (again applies to only few) that their rubyonrails support is not very great. You can upgrade plans only in terms of space/bw but you cannot add on more memory etc to your account (to run a mongreal instance for example)

HostingRails:

Hostingrails is pretty good for Ruby on Rails hosting. They have good set of documentation on how to get your rails application online (existing or new) and also how to debug a lot of issues. Their support knows rails well and you can find that out by glancing over their forums. However you may not get as much space/bw as you get with dreamhost. One thing i do like is that you can upgrade plans and also get more static memory for your account. So this may be useful if you want to run mongrel or other applications that require more RAM. Also its pretty easy to upgrade your plans and they can even help you upgrade to a dedicated server when you want. They say that they can get you online within 24 hours even when you move to a dedicated server.

Lot of the above information is what I found out reading their docs and forums and may not be correct/not stay correct. Please do let me know your comments and I will update the article.

PS: I am currently with hostingrails.com where I am hosting my new internet venture Muziboo.com. I plan to finish all the basic functionality in a month may be. Do check it out and let me know what you feel. You can read Muziboo Blog to know more about what we are trying to achieve there.