When dealing with suppliers, it is normally you who decide what you want before you search for a supplier or a partner. How do you approach this? Define your needs and requirements and what have a good idea what you want to pay? Do you always go for the cheapest or do you always go to a friend? No, I thought not.

Most companies have a website these dayshink about how you approach your website. Do you do the same?  It is the same with most capital projects.

It really is quite straightforward, although it is quite simple to be caught out.

The first step is to decide what you want to achieve – For a website that might be whether you want to attract more customers or increase sales to existing ones? Are you planning to sell directly to your customers, or is this more about providing information?

Don’t be fooled by smart design. A very cool leading edge website may very well look good, and appear on your web designers portfolio – however, have you measured the outcome against your original plans? Ihave been in this position with mult million pound projects, believe it or not.  A smart salesman (and I have nothing against salesman - my father was one and I suppose I am too) once "sold" one of our colleagues on a complex content delivery system that wouldn't have achieved any of our objectives, but it could be ready in a month.  We were put under severe pressure to adopt this solution - but we didn't and it turned out we would have been paying to build a system for them to sell to other customers.

This approach in the company had previously burned millions of pounds of cash - and guess what, it didn't exist at the end of that year (nor did the supplier).

In short, decide what you want to achieve. Brief your suppliers on this. Don’t get caught out by flashy design and the latest fad, and measure the efficacy at the end.