Business websites are ubiquitous now, cluttering Google searches with a plethora of un-asked-for and irrelevant results that take us frustratingly further from our final digital destination.  It has been estimated that the internet will produce more unique communication data in the year 2009 than the sum total of every book and novel that has ever been written in previous ages… combined.  With the digital sea so full of shiny (and possibly poisonous)fish, business owners are often faced with tough decisions about where their marketing dollars go.  They must ask, in these financially difficult times, where to find the best value to bring new revenue to their venture.  So, in a world filled with distracting terms like “SEO Friendly,” and “W3C Compliant,” as well as the age-old form versus function debate, What is the Difference between who is contracted to design and build a business website? 
Training-
Site building falls roughly into two major halves.  The first portion of building a site is the aesthetic design.  A previous employer used to call the “look” and design of the site, “the pretties.” Unfortunately, many business owners feel that a site with a strong visual presence might be counter-productive, and they try to force the sites design into the most generic possible mold.  Other business owners believe that allocating a budget towards creating a visually appealing website is akin to allocating grocery money for Christmas tree ornaments.
Both philosophies are damaging and wasteful of marketing budgets.  A web site serves as a digital store front, a visible entity that conveys the atmosphere and brand personality for a business to potential clients.  It is crucial to understand that a poorly conceived or executed aesthetic can damage your brand’s personality, creating a sense of unease beneath a potential client’s conscious perception of the site. 
As a professional designer with training from the Savannah College of Art and Design (after attending other colleges,) I can testify that a designer’s training is of primary importance.  While there are designers in the business world without formal design training, they cannot make informed decisions about font, color, grid alignment, spatial relationship, and hierarchy that trained designers (with hundreds of years of graphic design history and vocabulary) can make.  Every font has a purpose, every color elicits an emotional response.  Unless your designer can explain these to you, citing research and precedent, they are wasting your precious marketing dollars on an ineffectual design whim.
The second half of the design process entails creating the computer code that will allow an internet audience to view and interact with your marketing message.  The number of options on how to convert a flat visual design into a functioning website are truly daunting.  There are a few techniques and methods that are mutually agreed upon in the design community.  Certain types of coding, including the use of “frames” or “tables” in the site’s structure, are now considered extremely detrimental to a site’s success.  While this has been common knowledge among designers for at least five years, the number of “design” companies I have had the displeasure to interact with who still use these harmful methods of site construction is appalling.  The only way to prevent these dreadful shortcuts is to have in writing specifically in your site contract that there will be NO use of tables or frames, and that the HTML and CSS will be commented thoroughly.  Until business owners hold web designers to a universal standard, many designers will continue to make money using substandard tools and methods.
To recap: be sure to employ designers who have formal training in some form of graphic design; also keep a high contractual standard for what types of coding your site will be built with.
Experience-
No matter how many sites a designer has designed or developed, a potential client will eventually ask for some site function or utility that hasn’t been tried before.  As designers spend much of their time researching both the look and function for a site, they teach themselves how to overcome these obstacles. 
Longevity, however, does not indicate useful experience.  The work of many firms that have been in business in Austin for more than a decade is woefully undermined by their implementation of previously mentioned harmful coding methods (tables) and their promises of certain functionality without full research.  What is needed is a contractual middle ground.  When researching a unique function, a designer needs to fully disclose their familiarity with a particular widget or module, and make a contractual allowance for the possibility that the requested site function cannot be built to the satisfaction of the client or designer within a given time period.  I would rather lose a client to a competing firm than damage a professional relationship by being unable to deliver on a contract.
Static versus changing-
Many internet services offer simple websites for a few hundred dollars.  As appealing as this might be to businesses with a strict budget, it brings to the forefront a major question about static versus changing content.  There are on the market today three major open source (free) content management systems: WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.  WordPress was built primarily as a blog engine, and has now been modified in structure to accommodate more complicated uses.  Drupal and Joomla! both contain the platform needed to function as a blog and a means to edit existing set web pages. 
The major advantages to sites built on open source CMS are that open source products have an entire world of developers and programmers working to update and support the program, and that invisible databases timestamp every page change which seems to cause Google to decide that this website’s content is more important than static HTML websites.
Installing, configuring, customizing, and launching websites built on these frameworks is a time consuming process.  Any business that advertises these products for less than a thousand dollars is likely underpaying an undertrained staff, in a financial bind and desperate for clients, or cutting corners with your design.  Beware “bargain” websites, they are likely to lose web traffic and subsequent business.
There is an ocean of possibility in internet marketing, but many dangers lurk in the murky blue depths.  Remember to hire designers with degrees, to hold your design company to a contractual coding standard, and to invest in a platform to support changing traffic.  These are the keys to internet success, and the foundation to growing revenue from digital advertising.
 

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