The job of a web designer is to interpret your vision for your online presence and bring to life the ideas that you want to convey to your visitors. No designer works well in an information vacuum. No matter how gifted a designer may be, misunderstandings frequently abound. It can be as vital to spell out what you do not want your site to be as defining the features which it must contain.

Regardless of what your site is about, the one constant which defines a successful web presence is traffic. After all, there’s not much benefit in having a top-flight design if no one will be seeing it. Bringing targeted visitors to your page is the whole point of the exercise, and search engine referrals often account for 70-80% of unique hits to a given page.                         

The most important step you can take is to verify the reliability and quality of a web designer by closely examining past client reviews. Pay attention to the positive comments… and even more to the dissatisfied ones. Does the designer have a history of slow work? Poor communication? A habit of making unauthorized changes?

A multitude of specialized scripts have emerged to organize the functionality of Web 2.0 sites, each designed for a particular purpose. These Content Management Systems (CMS) simplify the process of administering a website and include a broad range of functions, which are often further extended by the use of optional “plug-ins” or “mods”.