The Buyer’s Guide to Websites: What to Know to Get the Website of Your Dreams

If you’ve got a business, a product, a brand, or even just an idea, you need a website. In today’s digital landscape, an online presence is no longer optional — it’s essential for success.

However, the Internet still remains an unregulated frontier where good guys and scam artists often look very similar. Without experience and knowledge, the web can be a dangerous place. You need a guide for navigating the digital landscape and now you have one.

Enter: The Buyer’s Guide to Websites: What You Need to Know to Get the Website of Your Dreams by Drew Barton, a comprehensive toolkit for building and managing an incredible website, from agency vetting and contract creation to development oversight, design input, and digital marketing.

Throughout, Barton, the former webmaster at CNN.com and founder and president of an award-winning digital agency Southern Web, breaks down the process of finding, hiring, and working with web developers and designers. Don’t fall prey to unqualified imposters: The Buyer’s Guide to Websites will teach you how to ask the right questions, make the right decisions, and create a website that helps you succeed online.

The Buyer’s Guide to Websites is broken up into three, easy to read sections:

Part one – outlines the digital agency’s role in developing and designing your website, covers the questions to ask when choosing an agency, and talks about how you can effectively work with an agency to achieve the best possible results.

Part two – discusses the importance of protecting yourself legally when working with an agency. By Demystifying the key elements of your contract such as the Statement of Work and Service Level Agreement – this section shows you how a contract protects you when things go wrong.

Part three – gets into the nuts and bolts of planning your website, from drawing up and sticking to a budget to leveraging your web presence to grow your business through digital marketing. The section finishes with some closing thoughts and provides helpful additional resources for you to look at moving forward.

The internet is brimming with scammers, but when you are armed with the right knowledge, you’ll discover that it’s also home to ripe opportunities for your business to grow. So many businesses are already achieving great success online – it’s now more important than ever to join them. Using the information and resources provided in this book, you’ll be able to navigate your way to website destinated to enhance and multiply your business prospects.

Drew Barton is the former webmaster for CNN.com and the founder & president of Southern Web, an award-winning digital agency specializing in web development and digital marketing solutions. Over the past two decades, he has overseen thousands of successful web projects but has also observed countless instances of malpractice within the web development industry.

Barton has written The Buyer’s Guide to Websites to empower business owners with a comprehensive guide that spells out exactly what to expect from a digital agency, and most importantly, how to avoid becoming a victim with the best free press release sites.