Listen . Design . Build

• Startup Budget. How much will you spend to create and launch the website?
• Website hosting. What is your budget? A small website with a few visitors is inexpensive. A large website with many visitors requires much more capacity and expense.
• Maintenance Budget. How much will you spend for maintenance? How often do you expect to update or change the site?
• Advertising. Will you pay fees to promote your website? Google Adwords? Facebook ads?

• Trademarks. Do you have any trademarks that will need to be used on your website? Is there a potential problem with another site with a similar domain name?
• Website Name. Do you already have a domain name? If so, does it work well-not all domain names do. If not, what information should your website name convey to search engines and users?
• Logo. Do you have a logo? Are you interested in obtaining a logo? Do you know a good graphics artist?
• Competitors. What other websites are important to your success? Who are your competitors, and what is their website's address?

• Look and Feel. Have you seen a feature on another website that you would like to incorporate into your website? If so, where?
• Users. Who will use the site and why? In a sentence of no more than 25 words, how would you best describe your products/services to a potential customer?
• Example Websites. What are the web addresses of some websites that might serve as models?
• Partner Websites. What sites will help you by having links that direct their customers to you? Who will you refer customers to? What services are related to yours?

• Calendar
• User Comments
• Shopping cart
• Blogging tool
• Photo gallery
• Real Estate tools
• Appointments scheduling
• Connections with social media, e.g. Facebook
• (There are hundreds of tools that plug into Joomla.)

• Information. What information do your website users need and expect from you? How do you know?
• Services. What will the website do for your website users? Will this require special programming? Can off-the-shelf products or components be used in the website?
• Content Development. How will you create the information? How will you use the information your users send you?

• Site Promotion. Will you use pay per click advertising? Are you planning to use outside companies to submit your site to search engines? Plan to promote your website
• Timeline. How quickly do you want your website to be operational?
• Contact. Who will be the main contact in your business for the website?

Chances are that the moment you released your state-of-the-art website that you realized that it was already out of date.

• Someone released a new component or module that did something better than what you included in your design.
• Something in your product line changed.
• You changed some of your services.
• Your competition made a change, and you must react.
• (Heaven forbid) You found an error.
• (More likely) You found something you need to improve.

The worst thing you can do is nothing.

• Simple mistakes. Edit the article or data in the tool you're using.  That's easy enough, but do it before you lose credibility.
• Updates. With Joomla, most of the system updates are as easy as a click of the button. But, you (or your administrator) must click the button to upgrade.
• Tool Replacement. If you need to change out a module, it's not difficult to uninstall an old one and install a new one, but if you're dealing with a tool that manages its own set of data, you'll need to account for rebuilding your data.
  

Hickman County Public Library.

This is a single page design made especially for mobile phones where people expect to scroll rather than jump from page to page.

I trained the library staff to operate the website and keep it current. I rarely have to do anything because they can do it all.