Know-How Exchange : Strategy

1. Quality
2. Uniqueness (no clip art or pre-fab stuff)
3. Dependability
4. Knowledge of Branding
5. Price

I have a slightly different viewpoint. Although it is wise to to have some "old fashioned" lead generation, since you are a web design and multimedia firm, your website IS going to generate a lot of business for you if you market it creatively. Of course, no web site is going to pay the bills if all you do is build it. I give you the benefit of the doubt on that. Surely you know it takes a little juice to get the engine going. Seth Godin's book on Ideaviruses is a good one to read for some good viral marketing brain candy.

What better way for a web design firm to get business and showcase their previous work than...you guessed it...a website! There is a whole realm of marketing known as "e-marketing" or "Interactive Marketing". It's pretty popular and revolves around building a virtual business online, marketing it, driving traffic, database marketing, etc. So, contray to what you may heard elsewhere, ummmm, websites are out there making money and generating business.

Now, you are entering a very saturated market, so some unique tactics are in order. Web design is one of my main sources of revenue and I don't even have a website!! Not by strategic genius, just because I am too busy and was lucky enough to keep getting business based on referrals. So what do I do? send me an email sometime and I'll tell you.

I hope this helps.

BTW- to sum up my top 5, I have found that people like custom work, delivered on time, but don't mind delays if it is for the best. If you whip out something too fast, some people will begin to wonder (hence the pre-fab stuff). Some of the biggest web firms/designers still code by hand (I started out coding by hand and still do if DreamWeaver MX starts giving me fits). It's the difference between a real versus a fake marble bathtub. Know what I mean?

Plus, I think I should add a good knowledge of SEO is in order. Anyone with a graphics program can "design" a site, but very few can make it work well enough to warrant a premium. That takes real skill and a true talent for art.

I'd want them to provide suggestions related to what they think of the current site and improvements to it. Also include a feel for what it would cost to do these upgrades.

If your site does ecommerce or other activities requiring programming (beyond HTML), I'd want to see examples of other sites they have done with similar programming.

I would also want to see examples of sites that they have worked on where they paid attention to SEO (search engine optimization) for. This includes giving me some of the keywords which they are ranked highly on, so I could Google those words and see that their sites actually do get ranked well.

I would not want to hear all sorts of grand plans using the latest and greatest technologies and graphics and all that, but ones that meet my needs using tried and true technologies. Your web site is meant to do a job - no need to buy more than you really need.