The first step to building your presence on the Internet is to design a website that customers will want to visit - and come back to. Getting customers to stay long enough to explore your website is like getting them to stay at a store. Like a store, your website should be attractive and professional looking.

Whatever your business offers - whether it's a product, a service, or information - it should be easy to access on your site.

Whether you're building a site from scratch or updating your existing site, you've got a few options. Your goals for the site determine the options you should go with, so make sure you've got those nailed down first. Ask yourself, what you want to achieve with the site. Depending on your answers to the questions, you may be looking for a one-stop shop or separate contractors to address each part of your site. Designing your site can be as simple - or as complex - as your imagination and/or budget allows.

Designing a website is very different from developing one. There are two major components to designing a website: the "front end" and the "back end." While there can be quite a bit of crossover, for the most part design refers to the front end, development to the back end.

The front end is what your customers see: the "pages" that display the graphics, the images, and the text on your site. Web designers concentrate on the front end, choosing appropriate images and fonts and determining how images and text should be arranged. A web designer's strength is his or her appreciation for aesthetics. One should have a strong understanding of what will work visually on a computer screen and what the technical limitations are in designing for the web. A good web designer will also have experience in collaborating with a web developer.

Developers are part of a new breed of Internet professionals who can help you build your website. Web developers work on the back end, making a site work. This side of the process is not visible to visitors, but it is essential to enhancing the visitor's experience. Back end functions include making images change or move, allowing visitors to view different pages or enter data about them, or performing sales transactions. If you're hiring a web developer, learn to speak the language. Make sure the resumes of those you are considering include the following skills:

HTML for the text and layout framework of a web page

Web Imaging to create and compress images for the Web

JavaScript to write programs that run as part of web pages and to do tasks like validating form fields before submitting a form

ASP to customize a web page for a particular user on the server before it is sent down to the user

Java/C++ to write programs that are embedded within a web page - to do things that web pages alone cannot do, such as playing a game within a web