The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one's feet.
-Lao Tzu
The first step in development is to identify project objectives.
Do you want to grow traffic? By how much? How soon? What level of infrastructure will that require? At what investment level?
What action do you want your site visitors to take? Do you want people to sign up? Do you want them to buy a product or service? Donate to a cause? Attend a class? Share experiences?
How will success be measured? By traffic? Growth? Revenue? Registered users? Search engine ranking? Ads volume?
Investment: If for every dollar invested in a new site, the site yields two dollars in additional revenue, is the budget a constraint, provided your vendor delivers quality work?
Solid metrics, and Key Performance Indicators, KPI's, will help determine what level of investment and inform tradeoffs in the later phases of the project.
To serve you best, your website partner should be fluent in the language of business. Growth, share, revenue, return on investment, projections, budgets, timeliness, and key performance indicators are central to virtually every web project.
