2)Shop around for right design firm. There is no shortage of companies who can handle design and development of your website. Do not be afraid to shop around. Prepare a detailed RFP (Request For Proposal) that outlines things such as goals of your website, your target market, information you would like to have on your website, and advanced features such as ecommerce. Review portfolios of companies and send out your RFP to ones you feel have skills to do your job. When you've narrowed down prospects, do not be afraid to ask for personal or telephone interviews. Find out what their design process and work flow is like. Ask for recommendations about what type of web hosting your site will need. Also, make sure to review design agreement or contract with company you choose (a professional company will ALWAYS require a contract before work begins).

3)Have a basic idea of what you would like your finished site to look like. It's a good idea to do some "surfing" of web to see what your competition and similar companies are doing, but look outside your industry as well for designs that catch your eye. This will give your design team a place to start and an idea of style of design you expect for your own website.

4)Work on your "content". The content of your site includes all text you wish to display. This is a very important aspect to your site. Although you do not want to overwhelm your visitors with nothing but pages and pages of text, you do want to offer clear, concise, professionally composed and edited information. Proof read, proof read, proof read! If you are in doubt, it is best to consider hiring a professional copy writer. Remember that grammatical errors shout "unprofessional!" to viewer.

5)Once your site is up and running, don't be afraid to add or edit your content periodically. This keeps your pages "fresh" and shows repeat visitors that your business is active and "takes an interest" in staying up to date.

Higher search engine rankings

Not only will a user struggle to navigate an unusable and invalid site, so will a search engines spider. If your documents are marked up correctly and fast to load then a search engine will reward your web pages with better listings. Why serve a user a scruffy and hard to read web page when a perfectly readable and accessible page exists?

Powerful designs

CSS is an extremely flexible and powerful way of styling a website. All formatting is contained within one text file meaning a new design overhaul is very cost effective and fast to turn around from a designers point of view, meaning lower costs to business. If done correctly, CSS can degrade gracefully in older browsers which lack support into a perfectly readable document which is beauty of following web standards.

Lower business costs

A website following web standards is a more efficient and smaller website in terms of file sizes and bandwidth.

This translates into reduced hosting costs. Changing contractors can be a problem if code is written with proprietary software that creates untidy or browser specific HTML. Following a set of standards means contractors can hit ground running and give you far better value for money.