Ask yourself: Has your current website met your expectations? As with any business tool, a website should be built to perform specific tasks. By handling these tasks, the website should increase sales, reduce man hours, or both.

Often times small business websites are built in a "cookie cutter" fashion where one size presumably fits all. You know even better than I do that your business is unique. Is your website unique?

Shouldn't your website be built around your business model? Is your site built to sell products or services, or is it built to deliver information or media? Is it designed to generate new business, or enhance your current products or services for your clients? Is there fresh content for your repeat visitors?

To build a proper website, I generally need to have an understanding of two things:

What tasks do you want your website to perform?

What are the behaviors and expectations of your site visitors?

Our decisions are constantly affected by design. Why did you buy your current car? Most likely that decision was influenced by how the car was designed. Was it designed to be energy efficient? Or was it designed to be fast? Was it designed to be attractive? Or powerful?

As Steve Jobs said, design is not just how things look and feel, design is how they work.

A good website design starts with a solid foundation. One that can be built upon later to increase functionality. Visually, a website should be designed to deliver information to the users in a meaningful and attractive way. The structure of the website should be built to be "search engine friendly" so when Google and other search engines "crawl" your website, they can interpret the information properly and you can display at a high ranking. Last, the content of the site should be fresh so repeat visitors will be offered new information.

There are many technologies available today to build web content. The best solution for your business depends on a few factors:

- Cost. There is a lot that goes in to a website. In addition to building the site structure, there is content development, graphic design and search engine optimization. Are you ready to do what it takes to build a successful online presence?

- Functionality. What tasks do you want your website to perform? Do you want to be able to add more functionality to the site in the future?

- Effort. How involved do you want to get with site development and programming? To put it simply, the more user friendly a site is for a manager to maintain content, the more work went into building the 'back end' of the site.

I prefer to work with clients that understand the value of a good website and are ready to invest in the whole process. Those who are accomplished in their trade and want a website that satisfies their unique needs. Those who understand that image is important.

My ideal clients are those that are seeking a responsive, interactive website that delivers fresh content to their users, with a friendly user interface so they can themselves manage the site content.

Short answer, yes. For a computer programmer, any site content can be changed easily. Most small business owners, however, are not programmers and the thought of becoming one is daunting.

I specialize in websites where the content is easily managed by the site manager. This allows you to focus on your business and manage your website content at your convenience.