Amateur tips or how to make a full-fledged corporate website

At work, I deal with a rather specific topic in the field of construction, which, to put it mildly, is of little interest to the majority of “normal” people. For quite a long time I thought about the need to create a good website dedicated to the professional field of activity that would be of interest to specialists in my field and would be a reliable “help” in working life.
Having believed the stories of familiar programmers about the simplicity of creating websites and the pettiness of the problem, I enthusiastically began to work independently. After a year of painful study of HTML, Macromedia, the basics of web design and several hundred reviews, I clearly realized that I didn’t understand anything about it. The more I delved into the nuances of this work, the more clearly I realized the scale and diversity of the whole process.
Now the site is ready, it absolutely met my expectations and quickly becomes popular in its field. Based on my own trial and error, I would like to share my experience and give real advice on how to organize work and what to look for in the process of creating and launching a commercial project.
I take the role of the adviser on the grounds that I myself took part in the development of the structure, design, content and promotion, all the councils are subjective and do not pretend to be absolutely right.
Tip 1. First of all, you should decide on the tasks of the site (information resource, business card, on-line store, communication center) and its size.
The most important and decisive question to ask is why do you need a website and what do you expect from its work? The cost of a mistake in case of an incorrect goal setting can be enormous (time spent, money, effort). There is a huge amount of unfinished and abandoned work on the Internet that hangs as “dead” cargo only because the customers made a mistake in setting the task, or did not realize the functions that the project can perform in the organization’s work.
In my opinion, in modern conditions, it makes sense to make either very simple and cheap websites (business cards with coordinates and activities), or very weighty and costly ones that are “ahead” of the nearest opponents. The competition among small projects is very high, as they have already accumulated quite a lot over the years of active development of the network.
In order to clearly formulate the terms of reference, it is necessary to have at least a primary understanding of the composition and volume of the project. By the beginning of the software implementation, the logical structure must be fully prepared and the type of content that will be filled in (text, photos, tables, charts) is known. It is necessary to decide which sections will be static (unchanged), and which will be dynamic (with the ability to quickly add information).
Tip 2. Never do the site yourself and do not ask your friends and acquaintances to do this work, even if they are excellent specialists in this field, you simply risk losing them (and friends are more expensive). The project should be developed by a web-studio that has experience and provides guarantees on the quality of work performed, as well as providing operational support for themake either  its launch.
An agreement should be concluded with the organization with the obligatory indication of the deadlines for completing the key stages of the work, all the basic requirements, the terms of cooperation and financing.
Choosing a web-studio is the most important and defining moment. The main reference points at this stage are the quality of completed projects, their statistics, the cost of services, and the efficiency of interaction.
Tip 3. Do not order the project in a large company; they are designed for conveyor work and cannot provide their customers with a flexible approach in the process of developing and promoting the site. The best option is an average web-studio with good potential and working for “authority”. At the initial stage of development, such companies do not “pick up” prices and with a large “creative” relate to their work.
The second reason why there is no point in placing an order in large studios is limited interaction time: all ideas should be checked with time and “stood” in a trial mode until final revision. Average web-studios work at a lower speed and, as a rule, produce more detailed products, and you manage to weigh all the components and correct errors even during the development process.
Tip 4. It is imperative to carry out optimization and promotion of the site.
There is an opinion that good projects themselves will gradually become the leaders and take a worthy place without the use of promotion technologies. Given the efficiency of the search engines and the supersaturation of the Internet, it is safe to say that it is good sites that first need to be promoted. Unfortunately, the time for an instant and objective assessment of resources will not come soon (if at all possible), so you need to use all honest methods of population and try to be one step ahead of the competition.