Going Beyond the Online Brochure

Do you need site search, forms, Flash animations, e-commerce, databases, etc? These additional site features take time and knowledge to build, and will add to your bill.

Have a list of additional features ready when requesting a quote. Tell the designer what you want the site to do. They will have a variety of solutions for every site feature you request. Depending on the final solution, the pricing will vary. Custom work will be more expensive than solutions utilizing third party site add-ons. Building custom applications such as database design can be very expensive.

Your website designer will be able to tell you the cost versus value of each solution. Be sure that your website designer has experience building the kind of additional features you require. Ask them to show examples of sites they've created with these features.

As you gather ideas from the web, remember that big sites like Amazon.com, CNN.com, and so on, are highly complex sites. The budgets for these sites have run into the millions of dollars to get them where they are today. Use these sources for inspiration, and then decide what you really need and what your budget can afford.

Skip The Bells and Whistles

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. There was a time when the site with the most bells and whistles (animation, guest books, spinning logos) was the best site. Now they are a sign of a amateur site that will annoy most visitors. Add additional features to your site only if it gets you closer to your site objective. Extras will always make a site slower to load. Successful sites are clean, uncluttered, and fast loading. Use Google's simplicity as your inspiration. Their clean design is one reason they surpassed Yahoo! in search users.

Conclusion

Additional site functions add to the bottom line of your project. They should only be employed if they are going to have a positive return on investment. Some additional functionality is easy and inexpensive for a web designer to set up, while others are very costly. Smaller companies will be able to get away with limited site functionality, while larger companies, that require greater site automation, can expect to pay big bucks for custom work.

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