1. Try to have an over-all view of what you want your web-site to do, and what sort of customers you wish to attract. What impression do you want to give when someone views the front page of your site?

2. What will be the content of your site? You will need to provide the text which you want published on the site. We suggest you sub-divide your information and put different sub-headings and text on separate pieces of paper: these may well end up as separate linked pages on the final site. Include your contact details (see 8 below).

3. Use the internet to find out how other businesses similar to yours advertise themselves. What do you like, what do you not like? What interests you, and what irritates you? How do you like to 'navigate' the site? - is information easy to find? How was the site presented on the search engine such as Google?

4. Web sites which consist only of text are very boring! Select a range of photographs, drawings or other images which tell your customer something useful about your business. "One picture is worth ten thousand words" (F.R.Barnard) . These pictures can be colour photos or drawings which can be scanned, or pictures in a digital format. It may be easier for us to come and take some photographs for you. How do the pictures fit in with the text you are planning to publish? Bear in mind that if web pages are to download in a reasonable time, they should only have a maximum of about six small pictures.

5. Do you have a logo for your company, or a particular colour combination that you use, for instance on your stationery? The design of the web-site should be appropriate for the corporate image of your business.

6. Once the site is built and published, we need to tell the world that it is there. Let us know if you want us to undertake registering your site on key search engines. You will need to suggest 'key-words' which you think your customers may type in order to find your site, and also a short 'description' (say up to 15 words) of what each page is about.

7. Web-sites are not cast in tablets of stone. Bear in mind that web-sites can be modified and updated quite easily. No web-site is perfect and finished from the word go, and in fact it is often easiest to see how to make minor changes to improve a site once it is up and running.

8. Attached to the financial package which allows for hosting your web-site on the internet are a number of email addresses. Think about how email addresses can be used to help your business. Usually this is best accomplished by using them for email forwarding - for instance, we could set up info@mysite.co.uk to send automatically to me@myoldemail.yahoo.com