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Monday, June 11th, 2007

Posted by Jenn Lowther

You’ve come to the determination that you need a website or your current website needs to be overhauled. You now need to find a website development company to do this. This is the easy part in the process. The question then becomes where do I go from here? This is one of the most critical steps in your decision making process. It will set the tone for the entire development process and the look and functionality of the final product. There are many factors that you need to decide before you determine which website design company is the best fit with your company and goals.

A big part of the problem is it is difficult to put of the details of the website development project into writing before you know what you need and what the end result is going to look like. Ideally you would seek a knowledgeable Internet consultant to help visualize and define what your project should include before you write the request for proposal (RFP). A good consultant can help produce an RFP that should make the development process easier for both sides. This step is not always feasible given budget and time constraints, given this, before approaching any website design firm, there are several questions that you should answer for yourself before you proceed with the website development process. With the answers in hand to these questions, you will be able to clearly communicate your needs and the results that you expect from your new website and the website development company will not have to guess as to what you expect.

This is where a request for proposal (RFP) will help you navigate though the website development process. Below are the questions that you should have answered and put you’re your RFP before moving forward with the process:

• Do you need to create a new website? Or redesign an existing website?
• What’s the nature of your business?
• What are your goals and objectives for the site?
• What do you want the site to do for your company?
• What would you like visitors to get out of your site?
• Who is your target audience?
• Who is your competition? What is your competition currently doing better or worse than your company? Creating a SWOT chart may help in this process.
• Will you be making sales on the site?
• How many products will you be selling?
• Will you be accepting credit cards?
• Do you want shopping cart? Order form? Or e-mail to process orders?
• Have you already bought ecommerce software or will you need the system built from scratch?
• About how many pages and sections will your site have?
• How many images/graphics are you planning to use on your site?
• Do you have the images you’d like to use already in digital format? Or do they need to be scanned? Do you need the graphics/photos to be developed?
• What (if any) special features do plan to integrate onto your site?

• - Forms
• - Rotating ads or banners
• - Flash
• - Site registration
• - Site search engine
• - Quiz, surveys, voting
• - Music/sound effects
• - Message/discussion board
• - Chat room
• - Animation, movies

Do you want to perform search engine optimization on your website? Ideally this will be integrated into the process from the beginning as it will save you time and money down the road.

Now that you have determined what the structure and core features of your website, you can move ahead with what you want the site to look like. Below are critical questions that need to be answered before development can move ahead:

• Do you have any URL’s of websites that you really like?
• Do you have any URL’s of websites that you really dislike?
• Do you have any particular colours in mind for your site?
• Are there any colours you do not want?
• Do you have a logo? If so, do you have it available in digital format, or is it currently available for print only? Do you need or want one?
• The final questions that need to be answered pertain to budget and timelines.

• - What is your budget for your site?
• - When did you want to launch your site?
• - Are there any other upcoming plans for your site?
• - Who will be the point person that will deal with the website development company?

Armed with the answers to these questions, you can write your RFP and can move forward and select a website development company. A two-stage proposal process with lots of scoping time built in is ideal. The first stage is to sort through the crowd and select a short list of companies to bid on the website development RFP. The idea is to find 3 or 4 development companies you can envision working with. To do this you need to prepare a scoping document that the interested developers can use as a starting point.

Proposals should contain the following sections:

• Executive Summary containing a brief description of your project development approach and costs Corporate information including financial details
• Qualifications including previous clients with contact information and relevant URLs
• A description of your development process
• Asset and draft delivery methods
• Project stages
• Milestones
• Quality control
• Testing
• The proposed team and their qualifications
• Proposed schedule
• Costs and payment details
• Terms and conditions

You are now fully informed and prepared to make a decision about which website development firm will be the best fit for you and your project. Keep in mind that these steps were to determine which website development company you feel will have the best fit with your company and trust.

Contact Invoke today with a website development request for proposal (RFP).

Tags: request for proposal, rfp

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Blogging, Press Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.