CIO — Waking up from a snooze on the way to Australia recently, I chatted a bit with my seatmate over prelanding tea. This well-dressed Englishman's work is to purchase a variety of IT services, and his company has a wide variety of needs and concerns. During our conversation, it became clear that, while he was aware of industry buzz terms such as Ajax and Web 2.0, he admittedly had little idea what they really meant, nor how to find top-quality Web design and development services and solutions for a fair price.

As we chatted, it became crystal clear to me, as a long-time educator and advocate for professional integrity and best practices in Web development and design, that the buyers of services—the consumers, if you will—have been getting short shrift for a very long time. If I had one valid HTML page for every confused client who's told me something akin to "We paid for the most expensive of the three companies, and it turns out the least expensive is cleaning up the mess they made of our site," I could hand you back a very tidy Web.

Consumer confusion is the result of many individual problems when it comes to website design and development services, but in a nutshell, it boils down to the rapid growth of the Web and the lack of competitive measure available. There are few college degrees in the field and there's little to no relevant professional certification. Even fewer people are capable of measuring a company's quality against any professional standards since the entire field lacks that measure, at least for now.

In an effort to assist CIOs and other technology buyers who are required to make seemingly blind decisions as clearly as possible, I offer the following 10 tips. I hope that folks such as my seatmate on that flight will suffer fewer stumbles and greater wins when purchasing Web design services.

1. Cut through hype

The first step is to take a step back from all the buzzwords of the day. By the time buzzwords appear in the popular press, there's probably a bunch of us in the development trenches pulling out our hair and weeping.

Why? Buzzwords make a developer's life very difficult. Imagine this scenario, based on a real client conversation:

Client: "Hello, how's my favorite Web developer today? I gotta tell you, I just read about this amazing stuff called Ajax and I want it for my site. Can you put Ajax on my site right now?"

Me: "Well, we could examine what kind of interface changes might be enhanced by using technologies such as Ajax and decide from there...."

Client: "Whatever, whatever! Everybody's using Ajax and we should too."

If I asked readers to tell me what Ajax really is, many would be able to do so, but many would be able to give only a vague description. Neither is wrong. If your job is to work with those technologies every day, then it makes sense that you'd have a different perspective from a technology buyer trying to keep up with the latest and greatest website innovations.

For an explanation of the latest buzzwords, see ABC: An Introduction to Web 2.0 and ABC: An Introduction to Enterprise 2.0.

That different perspective impacts the way services are viewed and purchased. In my developer's mind, Ajax is a set of technologies that I might or might not choose to use some or part of to approach a given problem.

So, be wary of buzz, and cut through hype as much as possible. It's the first step to better communication between you and any prospective contractor.

2. Become familiar with key topics

This tip, while closely related to the buzzword concern, is not quite the same but it is equally important if not more so. After you identify potential buzzword issues, the next step entails doing some research on key development needs. This is very challenging, because typically there's pressure to get the website done. Often, that means cutting corners on research—and ending up in trouble down the line.

Because of this, you'll want to sit down and create two lists. The first is the needs list, which consists of such items as "We need some way to address credit card purchases" or "As a banking institution, privacy is of especially high concern to our customers." Make this list as comprehensive as possible, thinking both in terms of current known needs as well as potential issues within your knowledge base that might influence the scale and growth of your online resources.

The second list you should generate is the specialties list. This list will match the types of specialties your site requires as you are able. This will help clarify, for any potential company coming in, how to fill those needs and whether they are capable of addressing them.

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