Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Imagine for a moment that this afternoon you are scheduled to meet with someone who will become your biggest client. They will spend a bunch of money with you, and because you do such a good job for them, they will send you endless referrals. Your business will grow exponentially because of that one client.

When getting dressed for that meeting, what will you wear? Will you pull an old suit out of the closet that "sort of" fits? Will you grab some jeans and a t-shirt you bought at a thrift store, because they are cheap, and what difference does it make? You'll have clothes on. Isn't that good enough?

Or, will you pick something out to wear that makes you look like the professional you are, or want to be? Your website may be the first introduction to that biggest client. A cheap, do-it-yourself, "that'll do for now" website could be your rumpled-suit salesperson who can't close a deal. It may mean your potential client chooses someone else, because they make a better impression.

Web developers, designers, and online marketers live in the internet marketing world every day. The good ones stay on top of the latest tools, trends, customer habits, search engine changes, and so much more, to make sure they are providing the type of service their clients deserve. When you hire a professional, you're not buying a 'thing'; a good website isn't a tool, a design, or a package of pages. It's an asset with the primary goal of growing your business.

Yes, you can build a website yourself. There are lots of free and cheap tools available to do so. What those tools don't give you is the creative skills, or marketing expertise that a top professional has honed over years of experience and ongoing education. They won’t give you insights into the proper use of keywords, and which ones your customers are searching for right now. They won’t tell you what does and doesn’t work in your industry. They just give you boxes to fill.

Marketing doesn’t come naturally for a lot of people, so how will you know you’re speaking the right language? Understanding your target customer, and the best way to communicate with them isn’t always clear when you’re looking from the inside – out.

Being held captive by a designer is an old business model. Through the use of a Content Management System, a professional can set up your site and give you the proper training so you can update it yourself. Ah, I can hear you say, "I'll sign up for hosting where they offer CMS installation, have someone else design the look, and I'm good to go!" For a few, that may be enough. A real professional will do a proper interview with you before starting the project to uncover your needs and goals for a website, and can customize the CMS (if they’re a developer) so it will work the way you need it to, instead of locking you into the basic functionality. Your website should do what you want and need it to do, and not be limited by the software’s restrictions and defaults.

I hear people saying “I’ll do it myself, and when it starts paying for itself, I’ll decide whether to get it redone.” That day may never come. If money is tight, yes, get something online to prove you exist. And then work on creating a real marketing budget so that you can bring a professional on board to give your business an online presence that will attract your best client.

Thanks Vijai, I will check out the link and see if that works for me.

Instead of spending a ton of money I didnt have, I spent a ton of time, which I did have, on building my own web site with Microsoft Office Online. I am extremely happy with the results.

I do however dislike the customer service, but for a free web site what can you really expect.

As of yet I have not been able to make Google analytics work, but this is a small issue considering the ease of use.

Jay Jetty

Carpet Cleaning Las Vegas

I agree. My designing and developing a website has a process. Click here to watch as video

Yah!! nice information

I actually registered just to reply to this because, frankly, some of the reasons used here seem a little misguided, to put it politely.

First off, I do not advocate just blindly finding the first web developer you can and throwing money at them.
Think about what you need. If you only want a static(essentially an advert for your business that doesn't allow any more interactivity than a contact form) website, then the cost you should be paying is very small and you could probably get away with doing it yourself.
A professional, who can make it look good and appear quite high up in Google should cost you no more than $500. Maybe $700 if it's visually-gorgeous.

Dynamic sites(that is, a website where there is a lot of user interaction such as e-commerce, a login system etc) are totally different and should be approached differently.
To give an example, someone who works for my parents decided she wanted to start selling things on-line. They allowed her access to their stock at a very reasonable rate.

Because she knows nothing about programming or how to get a site to interact with a database, she did what many do and subscribed to a service that does it all for you. She pays around £20-a-month and it's all done for her. Sounds great, right?
Not entirely. Her homepage(taking into account external images) is four times the size of Amazon.com's homepage(including all their external images, too)
2 megabytes for a homepage is utterly unacceptable. Why is it so big and slow to load? Because the system she used isn't sophisticated enough to resize her images into thumbnails.
So, it takes her full-sized pictures and loads them and then uses html code to resize what the user sees; the huge images are all still loaded.

This is just one example of the failings in this system for which she pays.
Every page loads slowly, looks cluttered(because she has no design experience and thought that cramming more on to every page is better) and there are all sorts of other design flaws and errors created by the system she uses.
On top of all of this, the HTML used to create the pages is way more than she needs.

To sum up, she has an inefficient, unattractive site that loads slowly. She probably likes it, thinking it looks good(because of her lack of experience in web design) and she's likely proud of having created it herself. Of course all she did was fill-in some boxes, so how good can you expect it to be?

She has to keep paying this monthly fee in order to trade. She can't make any changes to the underlying code as it's hosted, meaning it will only get slower and more cluttered over time.

I'm currently learning PHP(the most popular language for dynamic sites, it powers over 20 million domains, including a small site you may have heard of - Facebook)
I am not, however, doing this for the purposes of building sites for people like her and making money. Why would I, when people on rentacoder can undercut anything I do by virtue of their location?
The reason I'm learning it is to build a hosted software product. The technical term is Saas(software as a service) a great example of this kind of product is salesforce.com. Mine will be simpler, but along the same lines.

Because I'm learning this language(and associated technologies such as MySQL for the database back-end and CSS for the presentation layer) and am generally a geek who visits dozens of websites a day, I can see these errors in a way that she cannot.

It might cost her £1,000 or so to get a complete design from scratch, but it would radically improve her site, allow her to add, delete and modify product listings and would almost certainly improve her Google position for the keywords she felt were important to her business.
£1,000(around $1,500 or so right now) is indeed a lot of money, but as an on-line retailer she has no additional costs, bar hosting and her domain name.

To sum this up, right now we live in a world with opportunities we simply didn't have 15 years ago. Web developers are cheaper than ever(just take a look at the projects being posted on rentacoder.com - I'm not affiliated with this site) and the only cost of doing business on-line is a $10 domain name, $5-a-month hosting and your original design, plus any advertising you feel you want to spend. No longer do you have to commit to $30,000 or more per year to have a store in the street.

Is it really worth saving $1,500 in the short term and ending up with a terrible site that doesn't work how you'd like(because you don't know how to do it or rely on a template that doesn't do what you want it to do) and less than 50% of the sales you could be making, just because you're cheap? Sure, you might not be able to afford it. Take out a loan, but don't be cheap when it comes to the first impression that people have of your business.

I've just looked over your site. As I mentioned in my post, people who don't have design experience are often pleased with their results because they know no better.
The unfortunate reality however, is that your site looks amateurish and you lack the knowledge to make something as simple as Google Analytics work.

With a more professional site, you may well get 5 times, perhaps 10 times the business you're currently getting. You'd also be able to see who was coming to your site, from where, which browser they were using, which keywords were working for you and other valuable data.
But of course, because you're cheap and convinced you know better, your site is limited and your competitors are probably doing better than you.

It's not just you, either. All of the people in this thread who've mentioned that they created their own site using some cheap/free tool(bar one) have poor sites.

I agree

You should have your own website

So you can brand yourself and build your most important Asset

YOUR OWN LIST.

Its a lot easier now to build your own websites because there

different services and software out there that make it dead simple.

Like

http://www.marketingmakeovergenerator.com

http://www.xsitepro.com

just using the tools above will allow you to build a website quickly

and easily.

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British Coder,

If you are spending 500 to 700 dollars on Google Analytics, it is obvious to me that, the reason why you would spend so much is because there is no SEO or SEF [search engine friendly] code in your web site.

With the same 500 to 700 you are spending you can hire a web designer on a retainer basis, lets say 400 per month and save yourself 100-300.

What are you on about? At no point did I advocate spending hundreds of dollars on Google Analytics. Either you're unable to read and process coherent sentences or you're replying only to advertise the link in your signature.
There's clearly something wrong with your ability to process information, as my id on this site should make it rather clear that I wouldn't need to hire people to do things like you're advocating as I'll be doing this stuff myself.

What I said(which could be easily understood if you read it properly) was that the person in question had a terrible site because he did it himself and that because he lacked basic knowledge he couldn't get something as simple as Google Analytics working, NOT that he should pay someone hundreds of dollars to get it on his site.

Chances are that you(like others on these type of forums) didn't actually read my post. You skimmed it, wrongly-thinking you understood me and posted a lame, general reply to advertise your business.
Doing what you've just done makes you look incompetent and if I did need to pay someone to build me a site there's no way I'd hire you.
I actually just looked at your own site and amusingly one page throws up a series of PHP errors, yet again proving your incompetence.