My wife and I paid a local company over $20,000 for a web site that we could use to sell our photography images and use as a service to sell to other photographers on a fee based schedule. We lost our investment and have nothing to show for the effort, well sort of, during the end of that situation I went back to school to get a degree in Web Development. As I started to plow through my curricula I realized that the company I contracted with really had no idea how to plan and/or create a site to our specifications.
In my studies we learned the basics of how the Internet operates and the networking protocols necessary to make it all work. My building blocks included courses in Java, web design emphasizing CSS and HTML, server setups using PHP, and a solid set of multiple courses in database design using SQL and MySQL.
Once we got into web development, we were taught based on the ERP (enterprise resource planning) process. Our basic task was to participate in the development process as an analyst and not necessarily as a programmer or designer, our goal was to concentrate on the bigger picture. This more formal methodology is a little beyond the basic processes of a local web designer but the concept of determining the need and eliciting what the stakeholder needs is one of the most important tasks in the entire web development process.
I have been designing and maintained web sites for the last seven years. Our photography site has been one of the consistently top ranked sites on most search engines. I know what a small business needs, and will strive to help you either build your first web site or help you salvage a mess that you may have invested a lot of money in but it just isn't working as well as it should.