If you are considering or in the process of having a website created then you may wonder if you should spend some time doing research and learning a bit about it all.
If you are outsourcing the website design and programming to a company or individual programmer then you will not need to worry about understanding the technical side of programming, but if you can have an understanding of the process and basically the order that it is done in then this will help you communicate and understand your web design / programmer.
The first thing to consider is your target audience and what you want to accomplish by having a website – this may be selling a product or service online or purely to encourage people to contact you to discuss what your business can offer. You need to be aware that programming can be quite technical and although something may look easy it may take many hours of programming, What many clients do not understand is that changes made after something had been programmed can require a lot of extra work and if this was not agreed upfront or had been changed along the way then the programmer may have to charge you additional fees.
You should also try and have a brief understanding of what online marketing is and Search Engine Optimisation as this should be built in from the offset.