But it could all be dangerous trap.

To be clear, I’m not saying to avoid these third-party services all together. Just be careful about which ones you choose and how you use them. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Own Something Yourself

Having an online presence spread out over several sites and services is great – you’re in more places and you’re meeting your audience where they are. But make sure you own a home base – even if it’s just simple site with 1 or 2 pages. Have a domain name that’s a short and as easy to remember (and spell) as possible. That way, no matter what’s going on with the online services that you’re relying on, you’ve got a constant, permanent home.

Know Who Owns Your Content and Contacts

I know, I know – the terms of service pages on these sites are long and boring legalese. But read them carefully before you trust too much of your data and community to them. Do you maintain control over your own content? Can the site or service you’re posting to use your content for their own purposes? Do you have control over how the content is displayed and to whom?

If you’re using a service to build a community or contact list, understand if those contacts are yours, or if they are customers of the service you’re using.

Make Sure Your Content is Portable

If a year or two down the road you’re not happy with the service you’re receiving or things change, how easily can you take your content with you to a new service? Remember that everything you post to a third-party site or service resides on their servers, not your own. If you decide to set up a blog of your own or move your email service to a new provider, make sure you can easily export your contacts and posts to move to a new server.

Have a Backup Plan

Free online services like Facebook and Twitter have no contractual obligation to continue operating. They could be gone tomorrow without warning. Just ask the people who were relying on the Magnolia service that went belly up overnight and left them all without access unexpectedly. Make sure that you’re keeping your own copies of the content you post or use a regular backup service. SitePoint outlines methods for backing up your social media content in their article, “13 Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Content“.

In Conclusion

Using various social media sites and third party services can be a great way to get up and running quickly and at a reduced cost. It’s also a great way to meet your audience where they already are – on Facebook and Twitter, for example. Just be careful about which services you use, how you use them, and make sure that no matter what, through it all, there’s something that you own that’s uniquely yours and completely under your control.

But, Search Engine Optimization isn’t everything you can do to promote your site. SEO is just the beginning. Don’t spend a bunch of money and time on building a SEO site only to let it lie unused without much traffic. Here are some other important strategies for promoting your site and getting traffic.

Local Tools

People are relying on the internet more and more to help them find local businesses – restaurants, hair stylists, pet sitters, etc. Make sure you’re easy to find. Both Google and Yahoo offer easy ways to list your business on their maps so that customers searching your neighborhood for your business will find you.

Social Profiles

Chances are, you’ve got a number of public profiles with social networking sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Make sure your web site is mentioned in all of your public profiles. Make it easy to get to your site when someone finds you online.

Participate in the Community

No matter what topic you’re interested in or what business you’re in, I can practically guarantee that there’s a thriving blog community around it. Use blog search tools like Google Blog Search to find blogs in your area of interest. Head over and read the articles posted. When appropriate, leave professional, respectful comments. Comments left on other blogs can nearly always be set up to link back to your own site. If the other faithful readers like what you have to say, you can be sure they’ll follow your link and check out your site. The bonus is that you already know they’re interested in the topic.

You can also participate by having a professional blog of your own, either as your business web site, or as a part of your business web site. If you’re not much of a writer yourself, you can hire either a copywriter to write your articles for you, or you can hire a copy editor to take your notes and rough drafts and turn them into polished articles.

Traditional Media

Just because we’re in the midst of a web revolution, don’t discount traditional media. If you do any kind of advertising – television commercials, radio spots, newspaper or magazine ads, etc. – be sure that you’re always mentioning your web site address. People who want a little more information will have an easy way to find out more about you without being worried about being intimidated by a sales pitch. Also, make sure that anything you print for your business, from business cards to catalogs and brochures, has your web address printed on it.

Email Signature

No matter how you handle your email, there’s a way to program a signature automatically to the bottom of your emails. For your professional email, make sure this includes all the relevant contact information for your business along with,  you guessed it, your web address.

Newsletter

Many businesses create a free email newsletter for their customers and potential customers. To encourage people to sign up, ask them to sign up in person when they visit your business or make a free online offer for those that sign up from your web site. Be clear about what people can expect when they sign up – will you email updates, new product information, coupons and deals? How often?

Once you’ve built an email list to send your newsletter to, be respectful. If you said you’d send out newsletters once a month, don’t start sending daily emails. Don’t add people to your list without their permission.

In Conclusion

No one can deny that Search Engine Optimization is important, but don’t forget that it’s not the be-all and end-all of driving traffic to your site and getting new customers. SEO-only strategies fall short because they market only to the people who are already looking for you. Of course it’s important that those customers find you, but it’s even more important to get your message out to the customers who don’t even know you exist yet. Look for new opportunities to promote your site and business – you’ll find them nearly everywhere you look.

1. Hosting

The type of hosting account you’ll need for your web site depends on what type of web site you’ll be building and how much traffic you’ll be getting. Often, web sites get very little traffic in the beginning, but with the proper planning, that traffic can grow. There’s no need to pay for an expensive hosting account at the beginning unless you anticipate getting a lot of traffic to your site really quickly.

Your hosting account does matter – you need to know that if you run a successful promotion that sends a lot of traffic to your site in a very short amount of time, that your site will hold up to the traffic and you won’t find yourself with a broken or temporarily unavailable web site just when you need it most. You should also make sure that your web host has fast and friendly customer service available 24-7-365 because you never know when you’ll need it. Ideally, they should also run and keep regular backups of your site so that it can be restored quickly and easily if anything happens.

2. Domain Name

Your domain name is the address where your customers will find your web site. It should be as short as possible, easy to remember and type, and it should contain the name of your business and/or the name of your most prominent product or service. That not only helps people remember or figure out what address they should visit if they want to find your site, but can help search engines find their way to you as well. Choose your domain name carefully, and don’t hesitate to buy multiple domain names if more than one name fits and is available. They can all be configured to point at the same web site.

3. Plan, Design, and Build

You can go it alone and use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, or one of many tools available online for building your site without learning code, or you can hire a professional to carry out most of this step for you. If you hire a professional, be aware that much of the work will still fall on your lap – you’ll have to  provide the content for the site and teach the web designer all about you and your business so that your web site is a good fit for your business.

Your web site should be nicely designed, usable, accessible to people with disabilities and search engine optimized.

4. Marketing and Promotion

Many people get the first three steps completed and think they’re done. But they’re only halfway there. There’s still a lot of work to be done after the site is built to make sure that it’s successful.

Print the address of your web site on anything you print for your business – t-shirts, pens, business cards, postcards, brochures, signage, etc. Mention your web address in your email signature. If you have the budget, you might look at buying advertising online to promote your business, such as Google AdWords. If you belong to any social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, make sure your web address is always mentioned on your profile.

5. Metrics and Analytics

Throughout the planning and building phase, you and your web designer made many decisions about how to present information and what copy should appear on each page – but how do you know it’s actually working? How do you know which of your efforts to promote the site are successful?

You know by collecting metrics and analytics on your web site. Properly set up, analytics software, like Google Analytics, can tell you which promotions are bringing the most traffic to your site and which efforts aren’t performing as well as you had hoped. Metrics can tell you which content on your site is the most popular and it can tell you basic information about the people who are visiting your site, how long they stay, how many pages they view, etc. All of this information can be used to test new ideas, identify areas of the web site that need to be improved and determine which promotions are successful.

6. Maintenance Plan

Of course, collecting up all that information about your site doesn’t help you much unless you have a plan in place for acting on it. If you’re maintaining your web site yourself, reserve time in your calendar on a regular basis to go through your site, update any outdated content, and refresh photos. Study your metrics and analytics and decide what parts of the site need to be worked on to perform better. Figure out which marketing efforts are working best and work on improving the performance of those even more.

Developing and sticking to a regular maintenance plan is one the most crucial steps for a successful web site, but it’s also the step that’s most likely to be ignored and forgotten. Don’t let the time and money spent to build your site go to waste.

Speculative design is any unpaid design work done by an individual or agency in the hopes of winning later work. Here’s why it’s a bad idea.

Good Design

Good design means design that is successful in reaching its target audience, meeting business objectives and enforcing the brand. When speaking about web sites specifically, good design is also easy to use and accessible to all. Good design is reached at the end of a process where the designer and client collaborate closely.

Good design results from the designer learning as much as they can about the business, products and services his or her design is supporting. After the designer learns about the business’s background, message, target audience, business goals, branding, and image the designer works closely with the client to produce ideas for the design. Those ideas are then tested to be sure they are usable, accessible, and supportive of the brand and image of the company. Revisions are made, and the ideas are tested again. At the end of this process, a good design is produced that is successful and beneficial to the client.

How Speculative Work is Harmful to You, the Client

Getting to see multiple designs at no cost before making your decision might seem like an ideal situation to you, but it’s actually harmful to your business and your project.

Speculative design doesn’t benefit from the collaborative process of good design. The designer does not have all the background information he or she needs about your business, your target audience, your goals, your brand, etc. to produce a design that solves all of those problems. It’s usually superficial, visually impressive work done with the aim of impressing you, the client, and not done with the aim of solving your problems.

Design is subjective – we all have a favorite color or colors and certain styles or aesthetics that we naturally gravitate toward. When you choose what you believe to be the best from a pile of speculative designs, you’re not focused on the goal of the design, just on your personal preference. You choose your favorite design, not a design that solves all of the problems and does all of the work of good design.

Speculative design is expensive – you might not think so since you’re getting it for free, but don’t be fooled. Freelancers and agencies have bills to pay and expenses to meet just like everyone else. They cannot afford to work for free. The costs that they incur producing speculative design for you will be included in your project costs once you hire the agency that will complete the work. What’s more – you’ll also be paying for all the unsuccessful speculative design that freelancer or agency did for other clients who chose not to hire them. Producing speculative work for clients increases the cost of sale for a freelancer or agency, and they’ll need to recover those funds by increasing their pricing on projects.

Work that results from a speculative design is expensive work that is unlikely to meet business objectives or be in line with a company’s branding or messaging.

Appreciating Creative Work

Companies that strive for good design and understand its value, like Apple and Dyson, produce products that can be sold at a premium and that everyone envies. Design is powerful and valuable – it can make a product a pleasure to own, can make a web site delightful to use, can communicate messages without words, and can evoke deep emotional responses.

Requesting that creative work be done for free devalues the work and discourages designers from doing their best work. You would never approach your dentist and request a free filling, justifying the request by saying that if you liked the filling, he’d win the work of doing any future dental work you might need. Neither would you justify the request by promising that everyone would see the filling and be impressed and that you’d send your dentist many new clients.

Likewise, you shouldn’t make these kinds of requests of designers. Be respectful of their work and their industry and appreciate its value. Be respectful of their right to earn a living.

Use a Portfolio to its True Potential

You might be thinking that this is all well and good, but you’ve only got so much money and time and you want to be sure you hire a designer that will be a good fit for your project, and you’re not sure how to choose between them if you can’t see what kind of work they’d do for you.

A designer’s portfolio is not just a collection of pretty pictures or links to impressive-looking web sites – it’s also a list of current and former clients. Contact the clients and speak to them about their experiences working with the designer and the final outcome of the design. Ask questions like these:

• What was the designer like to work with? What was the design process like?
• Did you have any problems working with this designer?
• How is the web site doing – are you getting search engine traffic? Are your customers able to find the information they need? Is the web site bringing you new business?
• Was communication with the designer prompt and professional?
• How did the designer handle negative feedback?
• Are you happy with the outcome of the project?

Speaking to a designer’s clients will tell you everything you need to know about what kind of working relationship you’ll have and what kind of work you can expect. You’ll understand the process that the designer will step you through and get an idea for the quality of the work they produce. You’ll know if they produce web sites that perform instead of web sites that just look nice. And you’ll be able to find the best designer for your job without asking anyone to work for free.

In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of the jobs, tasks, and considerations that go into building a truly professional and successful web site.

Information Architecture

In a writing class in college, the professor put a random collection of objects on the table at the front of the room one day. Then she picked students from the class and asked them to come to the front and organize the items on the table. Some students organized the items by color, putting everything red together, everything yellow together, etc. Some organized the items by the tasks they accomplished, grouping writing utensils in one pile, personal hygiene items in another, etc.

Once the student was done, the rest of the class had to guess what rules had been used to organize the items. Sometimes we were able to guess quickly because the system used was logical and easy to recognize. Other organization systems had to be explained after many incorrect guesses. A good information architect is skilled at pulling the information of a web site together into an organization system that is logical and easy to figure out, making it easy for site visitors to find their way around and find the information they’re looking for.

Design

Design touches our lives in millions of ways every day – the products we use, the packaging those products come in, the cars we drive, the furniture in our homes, the advertisements we see, the buildings we live and work in, and, of course, the web sites we visit. There are as many types of designers as there are types of products produced by human beings. It’s easy to think of a web site’s design as superficial, but in reality, the design of a web site can reinforce a brand message, entice site visitors toward a certain path of actions, evoke emotions, and solve problems. The design of a web site tells us whether the person or company behind it is serious, professional, and trustworthy or fun, quirky and comical.

Copywriting

Most of us are able to write – we write emails and letters and notes everyday. But it’s a unique set of skills to be able to present a body of information in a persuasive and consistent tone. Much like design, the tone or voice of the copy on our site tells site visitors as much about the person or company behind the site as the content of the copy itself. You would expect, for example, a lawyer’s web site to be written with a authoritative and professional tone, while a birthday clown’s web site would be written with a fun and light-hearted tone.

In addition to engaging site visitors, copywriters with web expertise will be well-versed in writing your copy to be search engine optimized to make sure your site is easy to find.

Photography

If your web site is selling tangible products, then high quality photography is crucial to the success of your business. In the online shopping world, customers aren’t able to hold your items, try them on, turn them around, or look them over closely. You’ve got to work to make up for that by providing as much information as possible about your products. One of the best things you can do is to post high-quality, clear photographs from multiple angles.

Photography is also important to service and personality businesses – where your customers will be comforted by flattering, professional photographs of you and your team. Knowing what someone looks like can lead us to believe we ‘know’ that person and to feel more comfortable going to them with our problems.

Front End Development

Front end developers work in what’s becoming known as the ‘web stack’ – HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. They’re responsible for building out all the parts of the web site that site visitors will see. They do much of the search engine optimization work on a site, and make sure the site works in as many browsers and on as many different platforms as possible.

It’s a front end developer’s job to take the designs produced by the designer and turn them into a clickable, interactive web site.

Back End Development

Back end developers are responsible for writing all the code that runs the web site on the server. Back end code isn’t seen by your site visitors, but if there’s a problem with it, it can keep your web site from working properly. Back end developers write all the logic for assembling the pages of your site from information stored in a database, processing commerce transactions, keeping track of user’s accounts and histories, and processing information entered by your site’s users.

Database Administration

Most web sites these days are dependent on a database to store all the information presented on the site and to store information about the site’s users and administrators. To keep the database organized and running efficiently, it needs regular maintenance. It may also need to be moved or copied to additional servers to support more traffic on the web site. Especially large sites or interactive agencies that maintain many sites will often have one or more dedicated database administrators performing this work. On smaller sites, this responsibility often falls to the back end developer.

Quality Assurance

Interactive agencies and software companies alike use quality assurance engineers to put any new web site or product through its paces before it’s released to the public. They make sure that everything is working the way that it should and report back to the front end developers, back end developers or database administrators if anything is broken.

Usability

If a site is usable, that means that visitors can easily find what they’re looking for and can easily identify what parts of the site they can interact with. While there are usability experts working in the field of web site development, more often than not, making sure a web site is usable falls to the members of the team building the site. The only way to know for sure that your site is usable is to conduct usability testing.

Many of us shy away from usability testing believing it to be expensive and time consuming, and it can be. But quick informal testing can be done to make sure the major parts of the site are easy to use.

User Experience

If there’s more to your business than your web site, then user experience extends beyond the web site into all the areas where your business, product, or service, might touch your customers’ lives. User experience encompasses not only the experience your customers have when they come to your web site, but also the experience they have while using your product or service, the experience they have if they need to call support or customer service, the experience they have when they walk into your store or place of business, etc. Some companies work really hard at one area of user experience, but fail in others. Strive to make all parts of your user experience as great as they possibly can be.

Accessibility

Accessibility means making sure your web site can be used by anyone, regardless of their level of ability or the technology they may be using. Oftentimes, people think that making a web site accessible is a difficult or expensive process that compromises the experience of the site for abled users, but that’s simply untrue. Making a web site accessible is simple, affordable, and straightforward, and more often than not, improves the experience of using the web site for everyone.

Community Management

A community manager helps to engage visitors to your site to become a part of your community and also makes sure that the community of users is satisfied with their experience and is not being harassed by trolls or other unwanted visitors. Many people mistakenly think that simply putting a bulletin board or message board on their site means that they’ll soon have a bustling community of people posting, but recruiting new members and retaining current members is a lot of work.

Project Manager

With so many people working together on building a web site, keeping them all on track and managing the relationship with the client is a full time job in itself. Project managers work with everyone on the team to create a schedule for the project, then check in with everyone on a regular basis to make sure things are going smoothly. They step in when things are going off track to bring everyone back together and keep the project moving along toward completion.

Without their expert guidance and people skills, many projects would never be seen through to completion.

Server Administrator

If you’ve purchased a hosting packing for your site, then you’ve also likely hired a server administrator, whether you realized it or not. Server administrators are responsible for tracking the performance of the server to make sure it’s responding quickly when visitors come to your site. They perform backups of the site and restore these backups in the event that the server crashes. They keep an eye out for suspicious activity or malicious attacks to make sure that the information on the site is secure, and they make sure your server holds up to traffic if your site suddenly becomes popular.

It Takes a Village

Building and maintaining professional and successful web sites requires many specialized skills, developed with experience and training. HTML is relatively simple and straightforward and most people could get the hang of it in a single afternoon. But building a successful web site takes so much more than just knowing HTML. Understanding the skills and disciplines that go into producing web sites gives you valuable insight into what areas you should focus on to improve your site and gives you the knowledge to evaluate the skills of any individual, team or company you might hire to do work on your site.

First, a vocabulary lesson

To understand what really goes into making a web site work for as many people as possible, you have to understand a few basic concepts. So let’s cover those first.

Operating System

An operating system is the system that runs your computer. Chances are, you’re either using a version of Windows or a version of Mac OS. There’s also a small chance that you’re using a version of Linux, and even a smaller chance that you’re using something else entirely. The operating system is the software that manages all the different programs you’ll use and manages the way you’ll interact with the computer.

Browser

A browser is the software or program that you use to view web sites. There are quite a few popular choices on the market, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Most of a browser’s interface is a big window that you’ll use to view web sites. They’ll also include an address bar where you type in where you want to go, provide bookmarking capability so you can remember your favorite sites, and probably also give you a search box so you can search the web.

Search Engine

A search engine is a web site that you use to search for other web sites. The most popular choice right now is Google, but Bing and Yahoo are still hanging in there along with other choices like Ask.com.

Screen Resolution

Even though each computer monitor is a fixed size, they nearly always have the capability to modify the display to higher or lower resolutions. The same monitor can be adjusted to show 800×600 pixels, showing everything large and clear and easy to read, or adjusted to show 1024×768 pixels, or even 1240×1024 pixels, where everything will appear smaller and more elements will fit on the screen. Computer users with low vision or eyesight problems will often choose a lower resolution so that everything appears larger, even though it means less will fit on their screen.

What’s the browser got to do with it?

Your web site is made up of some code. Mostly HTML, with some CSS thrown in. And maybe also some JavaScript and/or Flash if you’ve got some interactivity, animations, or video available. That code is the same no matter which browser your site visitors use. So why does your navigation bar look broken on your friend’s computer when it looks fine on yours?

The answer is that while all browsers are getting the same code, they all support different features. And to make it even more complicated, sometimes they support the same features, but support them in different ways. There are lots of ways to deal with that, and your web developer will know which approaches are best for your particular situation.

IE6 – the evil browser

There’s a lot of chit chat flying around the web these days about Internet Explorer 6, or IE6. It’s a ten-year-old browser that’s still in common use. An average site will see about 20% of its visitors using IE6. Two newer versions of IE have been released – IE7 and IE8, but unfortunately, a lot of users have either chosen not to upgrade to these newer versions or have been prevented from doing so by their IT departments at work or by their old computers that don’t support the new versions.

IE6 is such a polarizing issue because IE6 is poorly written. It doesn’t support a lot of the most popular features in use on the web today, and of the features it does support, it often gets the implementation all wrong. Code that works fine in all the other browsers is often broken in IE6. For more complex sites, sometimes the code is so broken and requires so much reworking that it doubles the time it takes a web developer to build the web site. Even for simple sites, there’s a significant amount of time dedicated to getting the site working for IE6 users.

Deciding what to do

What are you, as a web site owner, to do about the browser support issue? You can not expect your site to look exactly the same in all browsers. As long as the content is available and the layout is usable, people will be able to get to your content, even if it doesn’t look exactly the same. Making sure that nothing is broken to the point where it can’t be used will get you a long way.

You also want to look for a web developer with a common sense approach to supporting multiple browsers. There are two methods in popular use right now:

Graceful Degradation

Graceful degradation means building a web site to take advantage of all the newest features in the most capable browsers, then building in ways to make sure those features don’t appear broken in older or less capable browsers.

Progressive Enhancement

Progressive enhancement is in a way, the opposite of graceful degradation. Instead of first building features that take advantage of the latest and greatest, you first build the site in the most basic way possible so that it will work for anyone using any browser. Then you layer on styles and features that enhance the experience for users with newer and more capable browsers.

Over time, progressive enhancement is more maintainable and sustainable. No matter what new features browsers develop, you’ve got a solid base that will always work for everyone.

Save time and money with common sense

Your goal when building a new web site should be to make the site’s content available to as many people as possible. Make sure you’ve got analytics installed on your site so you can take advantage of the reporting features – this can tell you which browsers your site visitors are using, which operating system they’re using, and what they’ve set their screen resolution to be. Each web site has its own audience, so it’s always a good idea to have the data for your site’s visitors rather than relying on global statistics for the entire web.

Don’t expect the site to look exactly the same no matter what browser and operating system your site visitors are using. Aim instead to make sure the navigation elements are usable and look nice, and that everyone can get to all of your content. Make sure it’s easy to understand what your site is about, even when you can’t display images and styles. Use progressive enhancement to layer on fancy features so that everyone will be able to at least get to your basic content and nobody will miss out. You’ll be happier when you’re reaching as many people as possible and your site visitors will be impressed that they never see a broken feature.

A web site, on the other hand, is never really finished, nor should it be. We’ve come to expect change and growth on the web. A web site can be instantly updated with new text, new images, or entirely new sections and features. And if you and your web developer were smart about building the site to begin with, making these changes and updates should be relatively inexpensive and painless.

The revolution model

All too often, though, I see clients treating their web sites the same way they treat brochures and catalogs. They decide their business needs a web site, and they hire someone to design and build it for them. Then they ignore it completely for months or years, perhaps occasionally updating pricing or hours of operation when one of their customers notifies them the web site’s information is out of date. Then suddenly the client realizes that their web site has fallen woefully out of step with their growing business and they go about hiring someone new to design and develop a brand new web site. New design, new colors, new information and new photos. Only to ignore the web site again once it’s finished and to repeat the cycle again every couple of years.

This is what I call the ‘revolution model’ of web site management. Here are the reasons why it’s less than ideal:

• Your web site is usually out of date. Businesses (and people) grow and change faster than you think. If you only pay attention to your web site for a month or so every two or three years, that means that your web site is probably out of date an average 11 months or more out of every year. Customers come to your web site all the time, and they should always be getting the most recent information.
• It’s expensive. You’re paying for a brand new project from scratch every couple of years, and that’s not cheap. Over time, the money spent creating projects from scratch is going to outweigh money you could have spent on a series of smaller projects and updates.
• It’s disorienting to your customers. A customer who frequently references your web site for prices, menus, class schedules, or news is not going to be pleased to show up one day only to find that everything is new and they have to set about learning the new web site and figuring out where to find the information they need.

The evolution model

What if, instead of ignoring your web site for months or years on end, you set aside time a regular basis, say every two weeks or every month, to update information and brainstorm new features or information? You could set aside time and a budget for keeping the web site interesting, updated, and fresh. This approach has a lot of advantages over the revolution model, such as:

• Maintaining search engine positioning. People often think that search engines are only looking for key words, but they’re also looking for updated or recent content. A search engine is betting that information that’s stayed the same for two years is going to be less relevant and up to date than similar information that’s been updated in the last two weeks. When you ignore your content and your site stays the exact same for extended periods of time, you’ll often slowly drop further and further down a search engine’s results page.
• Information is always current. If a customer or potential customer visits your site only to find that it’s outdated and hasn’t been touched in months or years, they’re not likely to put much trust in the information they find there. Even if your rates or product offering or class schedule hasn’t changed, they’re not going to feel confident that it’s correct. And not all of them will take the initiative to email or call you to verify. Instead, they’ll go elsewhere.
• It saves money. You can grow your web site slowly, allowing it to remain relevant to your business and the direction that you’re growing. That means a lot less throwing expensive work away and a much higher return on investment. Listen to your customers – what are they asking for and what do they expect to find on your web site? Once you know what people expect and need, you can add sections, update information, or build new features to meet those needs.
• It creates a smooth and consistent experience for repeat customers. Customers who visit your site frequently are a lot more likely to take a new feature or updated photography in stride than they are a completely new design. They’ll still be able to find what they’re looking for and can learn new ways to get around slowly instead of being forced to learn a new web site all at once.

A simple case study: Facebook vs. Amazon

If you’re a user of Facebook, you know the angry protests that break out every time Facebook redesigns. You sign into your account one day only to find your account home page an alien land. How do you get to Farmville and how do you find out what your best friend Mary up to? You spend 45 minutes in frustration trying to find all those features you use all the time. And a couple of months later, just when you’ve finally figured it all out…you sign in one day only to find they’ve redesigned it again. You’ve become a victim of the revolution model of web site management. Even if the redesign was a big improvement to the site, you can’t appreciate it because you’re angry and frustrated at the sudden massive changes.

If you’re an Amazon user, on the other hand, you’ll be hard pressed to think of the last time Amazon redesigned their web site. I’ve been shopping on Amazon since 1996, and I can’t remember ever logging in and feeling disoriented, which is amazing, considering how very different Amazon is now. Amazon is very careful with updates and feature additions. They carefully design something new, then reveal it to just a small number of users. If there are any complaints or problems, they take it off the site and rework it, then try again. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny changes are released on Amazon’s site every year. And the changes are so small and incremental, we barely notice, though we surely take advantage of the new features and improvements without ever feeling angry and frustrated.

How to evolve

If you don’t have a web site at all and are in the process of building it for the first time, keep evolution in mind as you build your project. Will it be easy to add items to your navigation or switch things out? Will it be easy to update contact information, pricing, hours of operation or schedules? Try to make changes and updates easy to make, and if possible, make sure that information that will change frequently can be made without the assistance of a web developer.

If you’ve already got a web site that you’re frustrated with or embarrassed to be using, then you have a choice to make. Will small changes made over the course of several months be enough to bring the design and content up to date, or do you really have to completely start over from scratch? You might find it helpful if you’re in this situation to find a web developer or agency that you trust to consult with you about your site. Sometimes a few small changes can do more than you think. Make sure an analytics script like Google Analytics or Omniture is installed on your site so you can identify the most troublesome content and prioritize your changes.

And finally, don’t think of the web developer or agency you hire to work on your site as a short-term hire. Find someone you trust who you are comfortable working with long term. That way you can benefit from their expert guidance, will always have someone readily available to jump in when there’s an urgent issue, and can work consistently at evolving your web site.

A long term relationship with a web developer is like a long term relationship with your favorite auto mechanic. In the same way that you trust your mechanic to know your car and make recommendations for maintenance and replacing parts, a web developer will learn your web site and can make the best possible recommendations for improvements and new features. He or she will also know when something has become too outdated to rescue and will have to be replaced.

Make a commitment to evolve

No matter what state your web site is in – brand new, embarrassingly out of date, or still under construction – sit down right now and decide how often you’re going to review the site. If you’ve got a web site that’s easy for you to update, put an hour or two in your calendar every week or two where you’ll just comb through the site and update any out of date information or make changes to content that’s not performing very well. Check your site’s analytics and find pages that aren’t performing well and see what you can do to make them better.

If your site is a bit more complex or you rely on a web developer to make updates for you, then sit down with him or her on a regular basis to look at your analytics data and make plans for improvements and updates. You’ll keep your site up to date, the design fresh, and you’ll keep your customers happy and coming back for more.

Why am I talking about renovating houses in an article about creative services for your business? Because there’s an important lesson to be learned from the rush work of the flippers. So often, I get calls from potential clients who are looking to either brand or re-brand their business from scratch – new logo, new design aesthetic, new web site, and usually some print collateral like business cards, brochures, catalogs, or post cards. The catch? They need it all done in a couple of weeks or a month.

I’m obligated here to point you to the Project Triangle. You can go and read that Wikipedia article, or do a quick web search that will reveal dozens of articles explaining the Project Triangle with long explanations and Venn diagrams, but it boils down to this:

In other words, if you need your project done fast, you’ll have to pick between good and cheap. It’s like that saying that a single woman can pick any two between a great job, a great boyfriend, and a great apartment, or that married women can pick any two between having a great marriage, having a great job, and being a great mom. Notice how men never seem to have to compromise to get the best of everything? But I digress.

When you force ‘fast’ into the equation, you’re limiting your options in many ways, and that can spell trouble for the project as a whole. Here’s why.

Reasons to avoid rushing a creative project:

• Great agencies (or freelancers) are rarely available immediately. If they’re worth hiring, they’ve probably got a waiting list at least a couple of weeks, if not a couple of months out. When a creative agency does great work, they’re not often in the situation of sitting around waiting for work to come in. Word of mouth alone is enough to keep most great agencies busy and hopping from project to project.
• Not every great agency is going to be a fit. Even if an agency or freelancer has great word of mouth and a stunning portfolio, they won’t necessarily be a great fit for your project. Seeing a creative project through to completion requires working closely together. Personality clashes or vast differences in working styles can bring a project to a grinding halt. You need to take some time getting to know the person or agency you’re hiring and let them get to know you so you can both be sure the match is a good one.
• Rushing almost inevitably leads to cutting corners. Planning, designing and building a web site alone is a vast amount of work. You have to make sure that the information is well organized and easy to find, that the design is appealing to the target audience, and that everything is coded well and works nicely in a myriad of different browsers running in different operating systems on different devices. Often times, the only way to finish a rush job on time is to rely on tools like pre-built templates that get much of the work done for you, but that force the final product in a certain direction that may or may not be appropriate and desired.
• Cut corners now, pay the price later. A web site built in a rush is often not search engine optimized and can be difficult to upgrade or extend later. Web sites are living things that can change and adapt to changing audiences and changing business requirements over time, but of course, they need to be built to accommodate that kind of change. Otherwise, you end up with a dead end web site which will need to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch in a year or two when a new feature is needed or the site needs to be search engine optimized to bring more traffic.
• Big decisions should be made with plenty of time. Establishing the branding for your business is like establishing the personality and the voice of your business. It’s important to find the right message and then to find the way to communicate that message to your target audience. There should be plenty of exploration of different directions, experimentation, and discovery to be sure that the direction chosen in the end is the right one. All of that takes time. Time that you rob yourself of when you try to rush through the process.

If you feel like your brand has gone stale and is in need of a refresh or if you’re just starting out with a brand new business idea and you feel like you need your logo, web site, and other creative work done immediately, reconsider your position. Oftentimes, there’s a conference or some other event that makes a client feel pressured to have the perfect branding in place in a short amount of time. I’ve worked with a lot of clients through the years who rushed a design process only to feel unhappy with the product by the end. Or who rushed a design process for an event only to realize a month or two later that they had reconsidered the direction and now needed to start over from scratch.

Give yourself plenty of time to find an agency that’s a great fit and to find a direction for the creative work that befits your business venture. Realize that high quality work done quickly will cost a premium – there’s always a trade off to be made, so make sure you’re making the right one. You’ll be so glad in the end that you didn’t rush to the wrong conclusion.

So which is the right choice – go it alone or hire someone to do it for you? We’ll discuss both options, the pros and cons, and then reveal secret option number three – the consultant.

Options for going it alone

Your options for going it alone basically boil down to two broad options – either learn how to write code or use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. A WYSIWYG editor allows you to create web pages in much the same way as creating documents in your favorite word processing program – you drag and drop, set some options and the code is written for you by the software.

Learning code

Learning enough code to put together a web site is no small feat. In 1996, you only had to learn HTML and you were all set. But not only has HTML evolved since then (and continues to evolve and change) but new technologies like CSS and JavaScript have become a necessity for building web sites. New dynamic methods for building web sites using databases and server-side programming languages make building and maintaining sites easier for the developers who have the knowledge to make use of them, but for someone new to coding, it’s just more to learn. If you’ve already got a good start on understanding HTML and CSS, though, this would definitely be the best option. Advances are being made all the time, but no WYSIWYG editor can write code anywhere nearly as nice as truly professional hand-crafted code. There’s a reason interactive agencies don’t hire people unless they know how to handcraft code.

Of course, the downside of this approach is the tremendous amount of time you’ll have to invest. Give this a lot of thought. Of course, as a small business owner, entrepreneur, start up founder or business person, you’re more than smart enough to learn the code. But is it the best use of your time? Is building web sites your business or a business that you’re interested in pursuing full time? If not, then you’re probably better off focusing on honing your skills in your actual business and hiring someone who can afford to focus their time and attention on the complexities of building web sites to handle that aspect of your business for you.

WYSIWYG editors and site builder tools

There are both online applications to help you build web sites as well as desktop applications that can help you build a site. You’ve got little more invested than the cost of the software or membership and you can drag and drop and choose colors, fonts, and images from simple menus, similar to your favorite word processing program. No code knowledge needed.

But the code written by these programs pales in comparison to code written by hand and you might find it challenging to accomplish certain layouts or to have full control over how the web site looks. It’s also likely that the code produced by the program won’t be search engine optimized and won’t be accessible to site visitors with disabilities.

If you’ve got a good eye for design and need a simple web site, this can be a good option for establishing an initial online presence for your business, at least giving your customers basic information about your business like what products and services you offer, your hours of operation, and contact information if they have questions.

Benefits of going it alone

Probably the biggest benefit of building your web site yourself is that you save money – you don’t need to pay a web designer to design and build the site for you. Many options are available for DIY web sites for free or at low cost, but do be careful not to choose options which cover your site in advertising. Often paying just a little bit of money means a much higher quality of service and no ads distracting your site visitors from your message.

You’ll also enjoy total control of the final product. Some clients find working with a designer frustrating because they don’t like giving up control over which colors are chosen and the look of the final design. If you take care of the site yourself, you’ll have complete control of how the web site looks.

Drawbacks of going it alone

Browsing around the web, it’s often easy to pick out the sites built by amateurs with little or no experience building web sites. If you decide to tackle the project yourself, you risk presenting this sort of amateurish image to your customers. Sometimes, customers find this acceptable, but if you’re in a business requiring a lot of trust, such a financial planning or mortgages, or if your site is an ecommerce site selling products, your business can be hurt by an amateur web design. Customers will feel hesitant to trust you and your site, and you may lose sales and business costing much more than the price of hiring a web designer to create a professional site.

Without knowledge of basic web conventions and usability principles, you also risk creating a web site that’s difficult for your site visitors to use and understand. If people can’t find the information they’re looking for quickly, they’ll often become frustrated and leave your site in favor of one of your competitor’s sites that is easier to use.

There are a lot of different tasks involved in building a web site, and you might find yourself overwhelmed at the prospect of learning to write code or learning to use your site builder or WYSIWYG editor along with search engine optimization, usability principles, web conventions, accessibility laws, basic design principles and color theory, FTP or file transfer protocol, setting up domain name registration and hosting accounts, updating DNS for your domain name, effective web copywriting, and so on. Web designers and developers are excited about these things and love learning about them, but you might find them overwhelming and frustrating.

You also need a basic level of knowledge about several different areas to avoid being taken advantage of by scammers and spammers that abound online. One of my clients, struggling to maintain her own web site, was seduced by a black hat SEO company who promised her number one positioning in Google search results. It sounded good at the time, but the techniques they employed resulted in her site being blacklisted from many search engines’ indexes, including Google’s. She paid this company thousands of dollars and they basically ruined her web site and it took her months to restore the site and convince the search engines to list her site again.

You might also take it for granted that everyone looking at your web site will see the same thing you see when you look at your web site with your computer. However, monitor sizes, monitor resolutions, browsers, and operating systems can all affect how a web site looks. Web designers and developers are experienced in dealing with these differences and know how to test for problems and provide the best possible experience for all your site visitors no matter what type of computer they’re using. But I’ve seen a lot of clients who are stumped when one of their customers tells them their web site is broken.

Secret option number 3

Maybe you’d really like to hire a web designer or developer to build a professional site for you, but you’re just getting started with your business or you’ve been affected by the recession or for whatever reason just can’t scrape together the money to pay someone to produce the web site for you. Secret option number 3 is to hire a consultant on an hourly basis to help you along the way when you get stuck.

This will be much cheaper than hiring a web designer to build the entire site, but will also save you time, money, and frustration. A consultant can help guide your choices, can give advice, and can often easily solve problems that are difficult or confusing to you. You’ll have someone you trust to jump in whenever needed to make sure your site is the best you can possibly make it. Sometimes you’ll struggle for hours or days with a problem that an experienced consultant could solve in 30 minutes, making their fee for that 30 minutes completely worth it.

Conclusion

You’ll get the highest quality web site in the least amount of time by hiring a professional to produce the web site for you, but of course that quality and time saved comes at a cost. Sometimes you’ve got more time than money, and taking steps to build the site yourself can make sense. If you do decide to go it alone, consider hiring a consultant that you trust to help guide your choices and to sort out the stickiest problems that might keep you from accomplishing your business goals.

This makes it difficult for people who are looking for someone to build their web site. The overall cost of the project is always one of the primary considerations and rarely do web design and creative agencies provide a price list for their services. It’s not that these agencies are trying to be secretive, but rather that we’re trying to avoid misleading anyone. Because every project is different, we prefer to work with our clients in the beginning phases of the project to work out what the required features are, who will be responsible for building and maintaining those features, how all those features will work together, and how much work it’s going to be to get it all up and running.

Two Approaches to Budget

The typical approach

Since most people have no idea how much a web site costs, they’re at a loss when it comes to determining an appropriate budget for their project. Lacking this important knowledge, they approach several different agencies, hand over a few vague requirements, and collect the quotes. Then they choose the agency who seems the most reliable and whose quote is within their range of affordability.

But turning your web design project into a sort of game of Price is Right isn’t the right approach. You’re likely to get a wide range of price tags which is only going to make the process more confusing. You’ll wonder why the cheapest agency is so cheap – do they do shoddy work and provide poor service? You’ll wonder why the most expensive agency is five times as much – are they just ripping you off? Furthermore, having no idea of what your budget should be can make you reluctant to contact an agency at all. What if the most you can manage to scrape together for the project is $1,000 and they come back with a quote for $16,000? You’ll have wasted your own time and theirs and feel a little foolish.

A better idea

Here’s a better solution. Do a little bit of legwork on your own, before you contact anybody. Look at your competitor’s web sites and see what they have on offer. Look at web design galleries and showcases. Get some ideas of what’s possible, and then put together a wish list for your own site. Then crank some numbers and figure out how much you can afford, both up front and for ongoing costs. Web sites need maintenance on a regular basis and it’s best to budget for a regular monthly cost in addition to the initial costs to build the site.

When you’re done, turn over your wish list and your budget to a few different agencies and see what they come back with. With this approach, an agency can tell you up front if they can’t take your job and you won’t have wasted any time. The agencies who do put together a quote for you will all do so within your budget. Then you can choose the one who can offer the most features and expertise for a price you can afford.

Pricing Rules of Thumb

Well, that’s all well and good I can imagine you saying, but I still have no idea how much money I should be budgeting. So let’s talk about some general pricing rules of thumb. The prices I’m quoting here are inclusive of everything you’ll need, including domain name registration, hosting account, merchant account, design, development, training for you and your staff, and so on.

Simple web sites

Web designers refer to simple web sites as ‘brochure sites’ or ‘brochureware’. This means that the web site is basically an electronic brochure. You’ll find some information about the company and its staff, services and/or products. You’ll find their location, contact information, and operating hours. If you need a site like this for your business, ideally look to budget $2,000 to $5,000 up front and $100-$400 per month for maintenance. If that’s out of your range, see the section below about exceptions to the rules.

Complex web sites

If you need a more complex site with features like ecommerce, social networking features (sites like Facebook), user accounts, appointment scheduling, multimedia, etc. then ideally look to budget $12,000 to $20,000 and up for the initial design and development and then between $500 and $2,000 each month for maintenance. If that price is more than you had in mind, see the section below about exceptions to the rules.

Keep in mind for all types of sites that often a bit extra can be spent up front that will reduce the maintenance costs down the road. These extra fees up front are often quickly recovered when the site is easy for you and/or your staff to update and maintain without having to learn any coding languages.

An Exception to Every Rule

Keep in mind that the prices I quotes above are just rules of thumb, and that web site projects can often be tailored to meet a wider range of budgets than you might think. Purple Pen Productions can, and has, built simple brochure sites for as little as $200 and has provided customers with simple ecommerce sites for as little as $1200.

On the other hand, I’ve also been involved with simple brochureware sites that cost as much as $16,000 and have contributed to robust web sites with lots of features that cost over $500,000.

$200 vs $16,000

Why the big differences in price? There are a few different factors. Let’s compare a simple brochureware site that cost the client $200 to the one that cost the client $16,000. What were the differences?

The $200 site used a free open source content management system and a free theme (design) that was simply customized a bit to fit the business. The client didn’t need any fancy features and hired a single freelancer to do the entire project in a single day. The client already had experience working with a blog she had previously, so required minimal training for updating and maintaining the site. The client also had a treasure trove of photos ready to be put on the site and wrote all of her content herself.

The $16,000 site used a proprietary content management system, built just for their site. The client in this case hired a traditional creative agency who provided them with a professional copywriter, a photographer, and a small team of designers and developers to build the entire site from scratch. The agency also provided a project manager to coordinate the efforts of everyone involved and keep the project moving in the right direction. Once the site was finished, the agency provided several members of the client’s staff with a couple of hours of one-on-one training in maintaining and updating the content.

In the end, were the two projects all that different? Could someone visiting the sites tell that one cost $200 and one cost $16,000? Probably not. Could the $200 site have been improved by doubling or tripling the budget? Definitely. Could the $16,000 have been done equally well with half the budget? Possibly – using an open source content management system would have gone a long way toward reducing the final cost, but it’s hard to replace the impact of well-written copy, custom design, and professional photographs.

Share Your Budget

Take the information provided here and use it to put together a budget for your own web site project. Decide which features you think are worth paying for, which you can do yourself, and which you can do without.

And when you contact an agency or a freelancer to design your site, be sure that your budget is one of the first things you discuss. Give the person or agency you’re hiring the opportunity to tailor the project to fit both your needs and your budget. You’ll be much happier with the result.

And maybe most importantly, keep in mind that launching a web site is not like printing a brochure. Once a brochure is printed, you’re pretty much stuck with it – the printer can’t make changes to it after the fact. A web site, on the other hand, is a living, breathing thing. If you haven’t got the budget to make your dreams come true right away, figure out what you can afford now and get started on it – you can always add features and change things later.