Website investment is a key to business growth, especially if you are a small or medium sized business. Yet often the first question most clients will ask us is "how much will my website cost?' rather than "What do I need to do to achieve an effective website that will achieve my goals?" The answer to this question will vary depending on your business, competition and goals but because your website is often first point of contact and the face of your company to the rest of the world, answering that question and setting an appropriate budget and time to achieve those goals, should be more important than getting the cheapest website or a website that does not achieve your business goals. See Custom Websites for examples of custom websites. You will notice every website developed is unique in design and function.
Over the years, we have analyzed and developed many websites and can confidently say that the amount of traffic any website receives is directly proportional to a number of key variables, the most important of which is content, promotion, code, page rank, links from high quality websites and the age of domain.
There are also many, many things that a website developer can do wrong that will adversely affect your website from building the site entirely in flash, (as opposed to using flash elements within the site), using frames, code that is not compliant to web standards, etc and many of these issues you cannot see by looking through a portfolio of web sites. It is only the experienced developer / SEO expert that will be able to spot the flaws in a website or opportunities to improve website rankings and traffic.
There are also a growing number of website developers who are scammers. They create a glossy brochure website by stealing content from reputable website developers, and then they email out potential customers, enticing them with too good to be true deals or exhorbitant prices (which has the opposite effect of making their services seem high end). Over the years, we've seen these businesses appear like mushrooms and disappear just as quickly, often leaving their customers with dodgy programming and with no access to their website hosting or domain name.