I wasn't able to find a reference just now, but I recall seeing the advice to small firms to NOT try to design or maintain their own websites. I think that's good advice. I designed my firm's site* in a fit of pique after too many schlocky pitches from folks who offered to slap our text and photos into their templates and host the site in such a way that their logo appeared on every page. Bah. The problem came in updating the site. When you're busy, it's tough to keep up adding or updating project pages. In an ideal world, you should send off selected photos and some text to your web person, who can quickly and efficiently make the updates. Also, web technologies are constantly changing, and most of us are busy enough trying to keep up with building codes and green/energy conservation standards, not to mention CAD/BIM system updates, etc.
(You might also consider getting help with writing the content. If you're like me, you're stronger at visual, spatial and organizational thinking, and not so strong verbally. After all, that's why we're architects... and why my post is unnecessarily verbose.)
You do need a site to make potential clients comfortable. If you do a reasonable job, and give it a bit of your personality, then some clients will comment that part of why they contacted or selected you was the design or "feel" of your site. (Of course, there are a few potential clients you'll never hear from because they were turned off by your site, but that's unavoidable.) I don't think it's a good value to pay for extensive traffic analytics of your web traffic. It can be interesting to see that someone in western Massachusetts looked at eight pages of your site over the course of 14 minutes at 8:37pm yesterday, but either they called/e-mailed or they didn't. (For our site, and I think most small architecture firm sites, a strangely large portion of the traffic is going to come from odd places like Bulgaria. Not that Bulgaria is odd, it's just odd that so many computers there are interested in my little site... I don't benefit from paying for someone to tell me that.)
Also, don't let yourself be dragged into a Flash heavy site. Some firms have sites that are nothing but one page that contains a big Flash element. It looks great, and for some web designers it's easier to update. But the big blob of Flash is hard for Google to index (thus you're less likely to be found in searches), and individual pages can't be bookmarked. This prevents potential clients from either bookmarking a particular part of your site to come back to later, or doing things like e-mailing a spouse or colleague with a reference to something on your site. It's just a matter of checking that your designer isn't Flash obsessed (or only knows how to do Flash, as is the case for some "web designers".)
The big conundrum for me currently is whether or not to add some sort of blog content. On one hand, I know that I have found useful contacts and contractors by reading their blog (or blog-like) content dealing with related projects or issues. I know that a lot of my commercial and residential clients actively research building issues on the web. On the other hand, as a small-scale firm, my focus needs to be on finding local and regional projects, so the global nature of the web and internet communications is likely to make for a bad signal-to-noise ratio. Odds are the best way to figure this out is to try it for a while, and if I'm overwhelmed with non-useful feedback and lack any good potential client contacts, then I can always shut it down.
(*I'm an odd case - I went to U of IL at Urbana-Champaign at the time that the first graphical web browser was being co-written by Marc Andressen. He was a friend-of-a-friend freshman year, and sophomore year I asked my friend what Marc was up to. He replied that Marc was working on some program to link together text and photos and send them over the internet. To which I replied, "They're paying him to do that?" Little did I know... (and little did I know that I should have invested a few years later when this stuff went commercial...) As a result, I was involved with web design from very early on. Don't get me started on the blink tag.)
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Thomas H. Donalek AIA
Chicago IL
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