A small businesses website is a marketing tool whose power should not be underestimated. To be effective, both you and the website design company of your choice need to fully understand the opportunity that this marketing tool can bring your business.

So what kind of questions should you be asking when you are looking for a website design company that can help you grow your business.

Question 1. Do you guarentee first page rankings for my website?

Answer: If they answer yes, give them a wide birth.

Website designers can get you on the first page of Google and other search engines, can they guarentee it? No. Google (and other search engines) is a law unto itself. They set the index formulas that they use to rank websites for particular search phrases and that formula is a very closely guarded secret.

So, website designers and Search Engine Optimisation professionals are in guessing mode, they may know that there are some tactics that work today, but if Google descides to change the formula tomorrow (and they change it regularly), your site could end up on page 500, where no-one ever looks.

Question 2. Do you have examples of your work that rank well in Google.

Answer: Of course I do. Here’s one, www.joblogcompany.co.uk, do a search for joe blog company.

But the thing is, if you do a search for a particular website or company name, and that site is already indexed, it will always come up number 1. What you should be asking is “what are the search terms that you have designed websites for, and what are those websites”. These are the phrases that people use when they are searching for a particular type of business. When the design company tells you which search terms they rank well for you should then do a search using the search terms that they give you and confirm they are telling you the truth.

You could also contact the owner of the website and ask them about how much it has helped their business ie. how many new customers they have gained through it.

Question 3. How do you market a website?

Answer: We submit the website address to the top 20 search engines.

When a website is submitted to a search engine, the address of that website is add to the end of a list of websites to be checked (also known as Crawled). That list could be hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands long. This strategy might get your website indexed within a month if you are lucky – the average is between 6 and 12 months.

Also, even with the website submitted to search engines, there is no guarentee that the site will be indexed, and appear in the search results.

There are many other ways to get a website crawled and indexed in much less time, even down to less than 24 hours of the website going live. Sometimes it can take up to 3 weeks, but the fact is that just submitting a website to a number of search engines isn’t likely to get your website indexed and ranked in a short time frame.

Question 4. Will a Flash intro page enhance my website?

Answer: Of course it will. A flash intro on your home page will make your website look very professional.

The reason that some web developers push flash intro’s is simply that they can charge more for the work because pages that use Flash are time consuming to create.

However, most web searchers hate Flash intro pages simply because they take a while to load into the visitors web browser.

The other downside of using Flash intro pages is that most search engines cannot read flash, so the page has lost any optimisation value that it otherwise could have using text and graphics.

Question 5. Who has control of the domain name and hosting?

Answer: Oh we look after all that for you.

The answer should be, we will register the domain name on your behalf, using an account that is setup specifically for you. We will give you the login details when this has been done. We host websites on our own servers, but on completion of the website we will give you a copy of all the files necessary for you to transfer the website to a different host should you decide to no longer use our services.

These are just a few of the questions that you should be asking a website design company before you engage their services. And above all, you should be ensuring that your small business website will bring you a return on your investment and actually add to your bottom line, rather than just becoming one of those expensive marketing methods that does nothing to increase the business that your company gets.