At a recent Gartner Group symposium, Barry Diller, e-business pioneer, confessed that his company, USA Networks, Inc., made every conceivable mistake launching its site. Make sure your contractors have a clear job description and clear performance standards. And don't let them milk the contract. It's too risky, especially when job turnover is high.
Scale is king.
Make sure your site can handle at least two or three times the amount of traffic you expect to receive. If middle managers are tied to old systems, make sure they're re-educated to keep resistance down. Work only with adults. No matter how smart a group of Web whiz kids may seem, remember they're essentially in their first job. Don't slap e-commerce applications on top of legacy systems, because that's sure to be a waste of time.