maneetpuri

Website, Website, Website is what every business is asking for these days! But why does everyone need a website? The answer is it is an efficient means to reach the global market in the most cost effective manner.

In today’s world you will find millions (rather more) of web services firms clamming to provide quality websites, thus making it tough for non-technical buyers to make right choice of the service provider to deploy their website. I have been associated with this industry for more than a decade now and with time, have reached a level where I am heading an IT solutions company that specializes in deploying web-based software solutions, websites for mobile devices, internet promotion and almost everything related to web. In this span of my career I have interacted with many clients from various parts of the globe and have worked closely with designers, developers, analysts and business development people. I am here to share my experience which may help you to make a right choice while selecting a service provider for deploying your website: -

Check Experience – See what related experience do the potential vendors have. Your first priority should be the vendors who have worked on applications like the one you wish to have. Then should be vendors who have worked on similar type of applications if not exactly on type of application you need and last in the list should be vendors who have good experience of deploying feature rich websites but have no items in their portfolio that is related to your requirement.

Guaging the understanding of your requirement – Provide a small brief about of your requirement to all the vendors you have shortlisted and ask them for their comments. You will get response from all of them but what you have to identify is who all have proposed a solution that is very close to your requirement. Vendors with generic responses should be immediately removed from the list.

Cost – This is something which everyone considers based on their respective budgets, so no comments on it. But I would just like to add that if you feel a vendor can really provide what you want, you need to be flexible (within reasons) with your budget. Ask the potential vendors about tentative cost and simply remove the vendors from list where cost quoted is far away from your budget or from the costs other vendors have quoted.

Know about the approach each vendor is going to follow to complete your website – Ask this to remaining vendors and see what you get. The basis of short listing vendors on this phase should be – a good approach is one that takes your website towards completion in milestones, requires your involvement for the accomplishment of every milestone and most importantly inception stage should be conceptualizing where work is being defined and your preferences are being well understood before handing over the website to production people.

Flexibility – By now you will have a small list of shortlisted vendors. Many times it happens that during production some new ideas come and some changes could happen to the design part and/or functional part. Talk about this with shortlisted vendors and see who is more flexible about it as flexibility is important.

Ask for more ideas – The list of shortlisted vendors will be even shorter now. Discuss with them to know what other enhancements they suggest doing to the website to make it even better and see which suggestions make more sense to you as you know your target audience and business model better than them.

Make the selection – Now you know with whom you would like to work finalize on the commercials, terms, delivery date and get started.

Not sure how helpful will this will be for you while choosing a vendor for your website, but I hope that this provides key things you should considering while selecting a vendor………

Maneet Puri