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You may not know much about designing a website, but you know what you want and what you like. Communicating your desires effectively to your website designer is a crucial part of the process of creating a successful website. To this end, we have prepared this guide to help you. Here is a list of the materials we will need from you, and some guidelines to help you decide what kinds of content you may want on your website. These are the materials we will evaluate to quote a price for your project.

• You will need a domain name and a place to host your website. If you need assistance in obtaining either of these, please make note of this when you request a price quote. There is no additional charge for our assistance, but we do need to be aware of it if you haven't registered a domain name yet. You can wait until your project is almost completed to make your hosting arrangements, but you should register your domain name as soon as possible to secure the domain name you want (if it's not already taken).

• "Surf" the web, and find out what your competition's sites look like and what features (contact forms, site search, etc.) they include on their sites. Make notes of what you like and don't like about these sites. Pay particular attention to ease of navigation, page layout, colors, and page load time.

• Find and bookmark sites whose style (colors, menu, and/or layout) is similar to the style you would like for your own website. As they say, one picture is worth a thousand words. Your designer can get a better idea of what you like by looking at the colors and such on an existing site that you like.

• If you would like a "links" page on your website, you must provide the URL's of the websites to be shown on that page.

• Look at your printed materials. If you have an existing company logo, or certain colors that are associated with your company, you most certainly will want them to be incorporated into your website design. If you have the means to do so, these images should be converted to digital format. If not, we can convert them for a modest fee.

• Quite a bit of your site content can be gleaned from your printed promotional materials. Company information, history, maps and directions, and other information can be easily and effectively presented on your website. These should be converted to electronic format (.txt, .doc, .rtf files). If not, we can convert them for a modest fee.

• If you are providing a service or a product for sale, you should provide a current photograph of yourself (and in some cases, your staff) to display on your website. Many folks are still a bit nervous about making purchases online. Your visitors are more likely to trust you if they can see your face. If you have the means to do so, these photographs should be converted to digital format. If not, we can convert them for a modest fee. Please do not resize the digital files. We can obtain a much better result if we have a copy of the original .jpg file to work with.

  If you are providing a product for sale online, you will need to make arrangements to handle your customers credit card and personal information securely. We can give you some guidance as to what needs to be done, but the responsibility of making these arrangements is yours.

• If you are providing a service, your visitors will want information about your qualifications and experience. In most cases, a short paragraph or two about your education and experience will do nicely. In some situations, a page of comments from satisfied customers may also be desirable.

• Put yourself in your visitors' shoes. What kinds of information would they want to have available on your website? Ask your current clients what they would like to see. The answers to these questions will tell you what kinds of content you should have on your website.

• You'll need to decide what kinds of interactive features you want on your website. Do you want a contact form for your visitors to use? An F.A.Q. to help answer their questions? A trouble ticket system to track and answer their concerns online? A message board where they can congregate? Any of these can be useful additions in the right circumstances.

• Giving something away on your website (i.e., free recipes on a website to sell cookware, e-books, how-to's) is a good way to attract and keep visitors. If you would like to incude something like this, your website designer will need those materials also.

• We need to know if you would like us to handle online promotion of your website. This would consist of us submitting your URL to ten major search engines and/or directories. Some of these charge fees for commercial sites, and these fees will be reflected in our price for this service. If you need this service, complete information will be included in your quote.

GMB WebWorks does not write the copy for the websites we design for clients. It is up to the client to provide the text content, photos, and any other materials for inclusion on your website.