A lot of great businesses have completely mediocre websites.  It’s easy for a brick-and-mortar establishment with no history of web leads and sales to overlook this point of contact for their business front end.

Some such businesses take the step to create a website, but only perfunctory in nature with little attention paid to goals and design.  Depending upon your market position, this may or may not be risky.  For successful mid-sized enterprise looking to grow and raise capital with a public stock offering, this is a terrible mistake to make.  First impressions are everything and a cheap-looking “afterthought” website says that either (A.) no one within the company is keeping close tabs on the company’s image or the manner in which company information is disseminated, or worse yet (B.) they don’t have the budget available to put together even a minimally presentable web front end.

Just use common sense, there’s no need for a long-winded explanation of how web design can affect first impressions of your business.  As has been mentioned before on this website, spending a lot guarantees no measure of success, as there are no silver bullets.  However – the flipside – spending nothing (in time, energy or currency) guarantees that your priorities will be made known to your sales prospects.

Chances are you’ll make a much better impression on sales prospects if your site has received some professional attention on both a content level and aesthetic level.

For small to medium-sized businesses and small businesses in particular, web design is a scary investment due to the lack of ROI metrics on many design projects (most SMBs don’t have the budget for such metrics even.)  A small business owner may feel obligated or otherwise entitled to manage such a design project with a heavy hand, thinking “It’s my nickel.”

Understandably, an ambitious web design project is a tricky investment for a business owner who is busy trying to grow while still break even or turn a profit.  The micro-management approach, however, invariably yields terrible results.

Take responsibility for the commitment you’ve made to whomever has been hired to handle your design project, and trust them to do their job.  Chances are you hired them after they demonstrated competency on an associate’s project or in a reasonably impressive portfolio of work and references.  The web designer got the job by being a professional and being good at what they do, in so far as they’ve managed to elicit project offers from business owners such as yourself.  Whatever your business is, it isn’t web design or you’d not have hired someone else to do it.  Therefore, you must go out on a limb now that you’ve made that financial investment, and trust the professional to do their job.

It’s very easy to develop creative impulses when overseeing a design project you’ve paid for, and it’s difficult to ignore them.  That’s a good sign, speaking generally, to try and do your best to ignore the impulse.  If you get involved and tell the professional you’ve hired how to do their job, you will (A.) be offering suggestions with no basis in practical, professional design experience and (B.) elicit inferior work from a now uninspired designer whom you are paying a perhaps significant amount of money.

You cannot guarantee great web design work by any means known to man, but you CAN guarantee less-than-great work by getting too involved in design projects and micromanaging them.  Trust will lead to inspired work.