A good web professional should be asking you questions like these as part of their service. But frankly, I would advise you to consider these questions ahead of time for the following reasons:

• Become a more knowledgeable consumer (saving yourself money)
• Make your provider’s job easier (saving yourself money)
• Reduce the risk of your website project failing (saving yourself money)

Is saving yourself money important to you? Well here you go then.

1. What is your web site going to do for you?
Tip: Try to identify specific sales, marketing and customer service challenges or goals.

2. What is your web site going to do for your users?
Tip: Think like a customer, a very impatient and critical customer with many alternatives.

3. What is the value of successfully accomplishing the goals from #1 and #2?
Reality Check: Your web site project should makes fiscal sense.

4. What is required (internally and externally) of your web site to deliver on those goals?
Warning: A common pitfall is to start listing features before defining goals, leading to a bloated feature list.

5. List the top 3 things you want users to do. List the top 3 things users want to do. How do these lists compare?
Reality Check: Its a red flag if these two lists don’t look very similar.

6. How will you identify and measure success on first day your site is live?
Example: Data entry is automated and the manual entry process is eliminated saving 10 hours each month.

7. How will you identify and measure success 1 year after your site is live?
Example: We currently receive an average of 17 new product ideas each month from customers via the web.

8. Why will your customers and users tell their friends about your web site?
Reality Check: Faerie dust and hope are not reliable.

9. Why will your customers and users repeatedly return to your web site?
Tip: Regularly deliver something new and valuable to your customers and users.

10. Does your investment support #4 (requirements) and make sense with #3 (value).
Reality Check: Make sure your aren’t strangling your web site before it even has a chance.

Are these questions helpful to you? Do they make sense? For my fellow web professionals, do you have any suggestions or additions that are valuable to you and your clients?

1. GoMediaZine

Go Media is a team of artists and designers out of Cleveland that provide tutorials, resources, and advice. They are very active in the design field working for clients and have tons of great resources to share. The freebies section here has mostly vector artwork, with plenty of other interesting tid-bits sprinkled in there like scatter brushes and Photoshop actions.

2. Psdtuts+

Psdtuts is a Photoshop tutorial site that is part of the Tuts+ Network. The network also consists of design tutorial and resource sites for Illustrator, Flash, After Effects and much more. Psdtuts is my favorite place to find tutorials, and they have a really high quality collection of freebies to offer. They have a great selection of icons and Photoshop brushes there.

3. Spoon Graphics

Chris Spooner is the man behind the design blog spoongraphics. He is an amazing web designer who is active in offering great resources and insights to fellow web designers. His freebie section consists of unique icons, brushes and textures that have a characteristic hand-drawn feel.

4. BittBox

Bittbox is the creation of Web Enthusiast Jay Hilgert, and he is dedicated to pumpin’ out quality free resources for designers. He has a huge library of web design elements to choose from (34 pages deep!). This is a great place to find buttons and interface elements.

5. Iconfactory

Iconfactory is the place to go for quality icons. They offer great icon packages to buy, but also have a wonderful collection of freebies. Their freebies have the same great quality and come in a wide range of sizes and formats for pc and mac.

6. Smashing Magazine

I’m putting Smashing Magazine down at #6 because if it were #1, as it should be, you’d probably not need to read the rest of this post. Smashing Mag sets the bar for the design industry in articles, resources, tutorials, and inspiration. Certainly their freebie section is awesome and should be in every web designer’s faves.

7. Blue Vertigo

Blue Vertigo is a massive collection of links covering every corner and category of the design world. I come here to look for more free stock photo sites, but there’s so much more I’ll never have time to see. The navigation is *unique (meaning nice try but XXX in my opinion) and there’s a variety of ways to find what you’re after.