+1 to reading Charlies site, lots of good information there.
A couple of general guidelines.
- Find out what software they're using and how much it costs.
- Worry less about how much it will cost you to get your data onto the web initially and more what it would cost you to get it back out (if you move hosting providers) and what it will cost to update it. Focusing on that will also generally reduce the up front cost but also helps keep it sustainable.
- Separate the design and hosting, if the designer is partnering with a hosting company (ore better more than one) that's fine but do price shop the hosting separately as that's an ongoing cost.
- If you’re looking at managing the content yourself long term, consider one of the packaged hosting systems (wordpress, google sites, I’m sure I’m missing some…) they aren’t super hard to use and the slight learning bump will pay off long term. You might consider paying for an hour or three of tutorial/lessons.
- I say this below but it bears repeating, be very careful of ecommerce solutions that aren't well known/pre-built.
I'll refrain from offering much of specific technological advice because its been a bit over a decade since I did serious web design and I'm sure the tooling has moved a bit since then. I can offer a bit of advice on the web designer selection process though having observed more than a few deals that didn't go nearly as well as you'd like..
A lot of web designers tend to over estimate their abilities, this can lead to spending a lot of time and money and not getting any deliverables delivered. I strongly advocate that anyone having someone do web design for them have staged deliverables spelled out ahead of time and do pay-as-delivered. That helps limit the scope creep and keeps the conversation limited to a specific phase of the project. Personally I always preferred to do pay-for-deliverable rather than hourly, but that only really works if the expectation are laid out very clearly ahead of time (and usually there is some 1-2 hours of hourly consult time ahead of that). This kept me honest when I was learning something new (not on your dime) and gave me a bit of lead when I was a lot faster than normal book at something (fairly common).
Be VERY cautious about designers who are offering e-commerce or other advanced features unless they are using a pre-built platform. They are unlikely to deliver (i.e. LOML’s friend had a yarn store that spent ~thousands~ to do quickbooks online inventory integration with a local designer and never even got a simple web site running), and even if they do, doing ecommerce safely and correctly is somewhat harder than you would naively expect.
There are a few main types of web designers you'll run into. The first is the artsie variety. They'll make an incredibly beautiful website using some proprietary tool that costs an arm and a leg to buy and pretty much locks you out of making much for changes to it yourself. I don’t attribute this outcome to malice, a lot of these tools are really nice (and a lot of the designers have spent a lot of time training on them) but it does have a long term downside if you decide you don’t like their service for whatever reason. The other problem is that the html code generated is often complex which means it can be fragile across different browsers, browser versions. Generally these folks can do static pages for high dollar prices and you’ll have to keep paying to do updates.
The second is the technosavage who will make a functional but not exceptionally attractive web page that has an overly complicated backend. The worst ones (cough guilty) also add in a lot of “magical” invented here bits in the back end code. That is unfortunately what a lot of my work looked like
This setup has similar long term maintenance problems to the artsie designer without the pretty bits.
Then there is the “template thumper” who takes a pre-built set of templates/design patterns then slaps your logo and verbiage on it. You can mostly spot these guys because if you look at the websites they’re running one of a couple of packages (
https://www.google.com/webdesigner/,
http://www.wordpress.com/, etc..). These guys are usually decent and depending on what you want out of a web page can be worth the money. They often leave you something you can work with long term (assuming you take over control of the content and they don’t keep it in some walled hosting garden). The downside is that you’re generally paying a fair bit for what you can mostly do yourself - IF you have any design skills. Basically you’re paying for design skills not the technical parts as much because most of the tools are pretty easy to use.
You're unlikely to go much past one of those three for a small business website (past that you're getting into more custom complex systems) so I'll skip the rest.
