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So let's translate this list of outcomes into a list of the features and capabilities you need to have as part of your website to ensure there's a way for you to achieve those outcomes. It's important to remember that while you can not build a tree house without a saw, simply having the saw does not a tree house make! You also need the know how and expertise to finish the job.

Roughly translated the list looks like:

• Is it easy to navigate the website? Can you easily change the structure and navigation of the website so that your any decisions you make while the site is being built can be revised and improved on later if need be?
• Is the website enough useful for the business? Does the website platform you plan to build your website on offer all the features you need right now for business, as well as features you think you may need in the near future? More importantly, is it being constantly evolved so that new features are being added all the time, or will you need to move providers and platforms every time you need to add a new feature to your website?
• Is the web site appealing to the eye? Can your website design be changed and upgraded without rebuilding the whole website? The design you start with, no matter how stunning, will age with time so the ability to easily upgrade the design is crucial, without having to rebuild the site from scratch. This way you can keep the site looking its best all the time without constantly reinventing the wheel!
• How good is the content of the website? Is there limits on how many pages and how much content you can have on your site? Do you have access to enough modules (also called page types) so you can add blogs, careers section, locations directory, etc as you need them? Will you have to pay extra for these pages or to edit the content? The content you enter will still need to be relevant and interesting, but if your website doesn't even give you the ability to freely manage the content, how good your content becomes irrelevant.
• Do the web pages load soon? Is the technology behind the website modern and keeps pace with the times? How long a page loads depends on a lot of factors and while the loading time will depend on what type of information (larges images and videos come to mind) it also depends on how advanced your website technology is. Clunky, old, out of date software will slow things down, think of your old PC software!
• Is the content relevant to your target audience? Do you have access to tools to randomly serve, schedule, highlight and promote specific content? It's very hard to guess what will be relevant to every individual reader of your website especially if you have multiple target audience. One way to take guess work out of the equation is use technology to present every user with manageable bits of information covering a wide range of topics and allow them to zero in on the information they require. Without these content serving tools on your website it's like playing roulette with your site visitors!
• Can the visitors easily contact the site authorities? Can you create multiple ways for your site's users to contact you? The hard job of getting a user interested in your business through your website is totally wasted if they have to wait for the next business day to call you. What you need form your website are the tools to create as many contact forms as you require from time to time. Of course you still have to read your mail and respond to those website queries, and ideally your website will help you accomplish this with a built in 'lead database' of all the queries it receives.
• Is everything functional? (forms /animation etc) What happens when there's a problem? How many times have you gone to a website and clicked on a link that went no where or tried again and again to get a simple form to submit successfully? You definitely don't want that on your website. And while no one can guarantee errors will never happen (it's a sad sad consequence of us being human!) what really counts is how are these problems dealt with. Are your problems addressed promptly and properly or is it a case of the sales emails being answered immediately and the support ones taking a week?
• Does the site appear on the top listings on a SERP? How much control do you have over your website's SEO settings? With the untold billions of websites out there optimising your website to make it easier for it to be processed by search engines is critical. There is no point in having the best website in the world if no one knows about it. You also need to dig a bit deeper than the 'SEO friendly' tag being used by every single website developer out there. Ask about how granular the SEO controls are. Because constantly fine tuning your SEO settings is something your website must enable, you simply can not afford for it to be a song and dance every time you need to alter one of the tags.
• Is the website search friendly? Does your website have a decent built in search capability? Websites with even moderate amounts of content are almost useless without the ability to search this content. Users who can not find what they're looking for will simply move on to your next competitor so the importance of the quality and capability of your website's built in search functionality can not be over stated.
• What is the conversion rate for the site? How easy is it to configure analytics and conversion tracking on your website? The time when websites were things you built once every few years is long gone. To be effective today your website needs to be in a state of constant change reflecting the changes in your business and the marketplace. So you need easy, intuitive means of measuring how any one change is affecting your business outcomes. Ideally, you should be able to configure analytics and tracking codes very granularly, even better your website should also provide you with meaningful statistics of its activity.
• Is the site built according to the SE /W3C guidelines? Are you able to delegate certain functions to other users and then monitor and audit changes made by those users? As a reflection of your business you will very likely need help from multiple people to manage the online side of your business, so it's crucial that you can add multiple users and specify what they are allowed to do. But even beyond that you must have a way of figuring out exactly the who and when of any website change so it's not just a free for all!