How to Have a Great Looking B2B Website

Building a great looking website is a lot easier that building the Golden Gate bridge. Especially, if you select a content management system with a good themeing engine. 

When you use a CMS as the foundation of your website, you need to select a user interface (UI) template for the site design. Most of the CMS platforms have bare bones theme templates that you can use as a starting point.

However, for most businesses the decision will come down to either hiring a designer or buying a quality template. If your budget is tight, consider purchasing a Drupal, WordPress or Joomla design template from Templatemonster.com or one of the other online template vendors for as little as $65.

A word of caution, installing and configuring an off-the-shelf template is more complex than described the sites hawking cheap templates. 

If you decide to go with a designer, make sure they have experience creating templates for the CMS you plan on using. During the evaluation, be sure to ask the website designer the following questions:

1. Which CMS will you use to build our site? If they don’t use of the big three (Drupal, WordPress or Joomla) find another designer/developer.
2. Ask to see specific examples of their work. You want live websites that you can tour.
3. Request a guided tour of the administration UI in a CMS that they have recently set up.
4. Ask if they have built any custom administration UIs for their clients to make it easier to manage content.
5. Probe to see their most technically challenging projects. Ask why it was challenging.
6. Verify whether they will provide you with full control over the CMS at the hosting provider.
7. Ask them about their programming skills. What programming language is their language of choice (PHP, Perl, Java, C#)?
8. Question their cascading style sheet (CSS) skills. All sites use CSS extensively today. Ask for an example of the most complex CSS problems they have encountered. Ask them about browser compatibility testing. Will the site look the same in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari?
9. Talk to them about their Flash expertise. Ask their opinion about building a site in Flash. If they are comfortable building an entire site in Flash -- run away!

If you want quality, expect to pay $10,000 for a basic custom website template design in a CMS. Moderately complex designs will run $10,000 to $40,000.

Want to learn more? Download our Ultimate Guide to Building B2B websites