The first things people look at when choosing a web site development company, is price, and whether their sites are pretty. If that is all you look for in a web site, you may be losing out on a lot of business.

First or all, price is really a non issue, so I will not talk about that here. As business owners you understand, it is not about price, it is about ROI.

Secondly is the part about pretty. Owning a website that is pretty will never make you any money. You need a lot more then a pretty site. For starters, when a potential customer comes to your web site, are they looking to be entertained, or to buy what you are selling?

There are a lot of web site design firms out there that focus on pretty. They know that if they can make their clients say "WOW - That is my web site" they can sell more sites. They do this with little care in whether the web site will actually help to move any product.

Rule number 1: Do not buy a site based on WOW factor. The goal of the website is not to give something for the webmaster to show off. The goal of the site is to move product. The site must push the product. - (The does not mean it can not look nice)

Rule number 2: Check the speed of the development company's portfolio sites. As a web site owner, it is important to remember that nearly half of your potential clients are still on dial up internet. Most business owners are on high speed so they do not even realize speed is a problem. Typically a good website will load in under 10 seconds on dial up. Under 7 seconds is preferred. Many of the "pretty" sites of the world, or those with flash animation take 45 seconds to 3 minutes on dial up internet. Now if half of your users had to wait over a minute per page to view your site, how many will stay around to buy anything? You can check the 56K speed at websiteoptimization.com

Rule number 3: Avoid frame sets at all costs. There are numerous reasons that frames are bad, but all you really need to know is that right in Googles webmaster guidelines, it strongly recommends against using frame sets on your site. (A frame set is easily recognized when you can scroll with one part of the page and the rest remains fixed)

Rule number 4: Watch out for email addresses. All new webmasters want their email on their website. This is a bad idea. Email addresses also present a range of problems including user email client configuration, spam, and lots leads. All contacts from your site should go through a form and then properly logged to protect you from losing anything.

These rules are not all there is to building a good web site, but if find a company that follows these rules, they will probably be a good company that knows how to make a profitable web site.