Think well prior to investment in a complex website
Having a website made can turn into a costly project that may or may not be worthwhile in terms of effort and costs. Before you embark on the project, and even before you pick a web designer consider about your business and what it truly wants to accomplish from a website. Once you have some answers to this question it will give you a good idea what kind of designer (if any) you could do with and a basic brief with which to begin.
Do you merelt want to have your business particulars listed on the internet so that clients who already know about you can discover basic information such as your email address or your opening times? If this is all you really want, because your business is say for example a grocers shop on a high street you will in all probability find that your wants are already catered for by the many business directories that are now on the internet.
Do you want to provide an offering for existing clients, providing them with information, backing and service once they have already identified you via another path. In this case your site might need to be technically very well built, easy to bring up to date but will require no Online Marketing to promote it to the search engines.
You may like to sell goods online, having a product which can be purchased without been seen as it is standard, for example dvds or cds. If this is the case then investment in a website that can cope quickly and easily with payments is crucial, the site will need to have a good Search Engine Placement so that a huge number of searchers are alerted to the products but the detail of the objects themselves may be negligible.
If your product is a niche one, for example say you traded in antique silver letter openers, you may find that there is very little need for any search engine promotion as there are so few competitors for your products on line. You may find that you consequently achieve a good enough Search Engine Placement position without paying out for the services of a SEO Company. People looking for these niche items are willing to search through a few more search engine results pages than they would for a commodity. However if you expect to get business from the site you will have to consider very carefully about how you lay out information about your products, you will probably need access to a designer who includes a cost effective ongoing service to keep the goods updated and also a decent photographer as images will be critical.
Try to consider about which of these examples would best fit your business and then pick your designer on that basis, if you still want one!