It goes without saying that the Internet has changed everything -- from work to shopping, and these days, even how some folks go about finding romance. Yet while we all enjoy the Cyber Age's many fruits and blessings, the fact remains that a surprisingly large number of business owners remain Web-shy, especially when it comes to taking those first steps toward establishing their outfits' presence on the Web.

How much to pay a Web designer? Will he or she maintain the site? How long will it take to pull a site together? Who can I trust, and how will I know for sure? For entrepreneurs who have already made the jump to the online medium, such questions are old hat. But for the tardy many still wondering how best to play catch-up, a little expert guidance is in order. That's where Stephen Laster, adjunct professor and director of the curriculum, innovation, and technology group at Babson College, comes to the rescue of the baffled and befuddled, laying out for BusinessWeek Online's Edward Popper how to hire a professional Web designer. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Q: What's is the first step in building a Web site?
A: You need to get information about the people who have developed a successful strategy, and how they did it… Look at all of your competitors Web sites. See what you like and don't like about them. Think about what resonates with your customers. Either make that decision yourself or ask friends, family or early customers to be a focus group, or pay for a focus group if you have the money. In a time-starved society, it all comes back to the question of how are you going to get a person to spend time on your site? That's the critical goal.

Q: Once you've got an idea of what you want out of your site, how do you begin the process of finding a Web designer?
A: See who built [your competitors'] Web sites, because many times, one of the trades a business makes when it doesn't have a lot of money is to allow the person who built its Web site to say, "This site was built by" somewhere on the site. In essence, you can see the good ones, see who built them, and contact that person.

If you are a member of a trade group, trade organizations usually have some level of Web support and some folks who will help you think through what you're going to do.

Q: Since the dot-com bubble burst, there is no shortage of underemployed Web designers. How do you tell the good from the bad?
A: They should give you a large list of references that you can randomly call. The person who only gives you a few references, you don't want to do business with. You should ask them to describe projects that have gone well and projects that have not gone well, and ask them to explain what the differences were. If they tell you every project went well, you probably want to walk away from them. Everybody has bad projects.

If it's too cheap, [it's probably] too good to be true, and you should probably walk away. In New England, a Web designer is going to charge you around $50 to $60 an hour, and it's going to take them two weeks to four weeks to build your site. A marketing Web site is going to cost around $4,800, so somebody who comes in with a $900 quote probably isn't going to be doing a custom job. They'll be cutting a few corners. You're getting married here, to use a metaphor, so you want to know the strengths and weaknesses of the person you're hiring.

Q: How do you know that you've done a good job setting up your sight.
A: The No. 1 thing is, that all the links in your site should always work.

Q: Once your site is up and running, who is responsible for keeping it updated and in good order?
A: Once your site is built, hopefully you've learned enough that you can maintain it. If you're hiring a person who's doing the site administration, it will usually be the same person who did your design. So you want to ask these questions: How many clients do you have? What's your approach to administration? How often will they check your site? How do they check it? How do you get a hold of them after hours?

If your site isn't being changed a lot, they can check it infrequently -- every couple of weeks. If you're making a lot of changes, you want them to have a testing process that they employ every time they make a change to the site. The testing process should exercise all the pages, links, and buttons on the site to make sure that they haven't broken anything with the change.

A lot of that can be done automatically. There is link-checking software built into a lot of Web development tools. So this isn't a manual process, but it is a step you want to know that they take, because some people don't.

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