Starting an E-Business on a Shoestring
Step 5. Obtain Professional Website Design
Web Marketing Today, March 1, 2001
I can hear you asking, "Why should I pay a professional to design my website? I can do an okay job with MS FrontPage 2000 http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00002SFM4/wilsoninternetse or Macromedia DreamWeaver. http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000050F96/wilsoninternetse Besides, it'll cost me a lot to hire a website designer, and I just can't afford it."
On the contrary, you can't afford not to. Unless you're thinking mighty small indeed, there are several important reasons why you should pay to have your site professionally designed. Let me explain:
Building Trust
The most important reason to have your site professionally designed is to build trust with your clients. That takes a high level of competency.
When my daughter was young she would bring home a drawing or painting she had done at school and we would make a big fuss over it. It would hang in a place of honor in the kitchen and finally be gently laid to rest in a folder to be looked at later. Were these painting really good? Well, they were for a seven-year-old, especially a seven-year-old who is your daughter. But are they really good on some objective standard when compared with artists older and more experienced? Of course not.
The danger of doing it yourself is that you may think your work is really, really good. You're wild about what you can do with this software. It's so easy! While in fact, as websites go, it is pretty shoddy and filled with problems. Only you don't have enough taste or humility to know the difference.
I am a strong believer in learning to maintain the website yourself. But for the initial design, you really need a professional. The result will be something you can be proud of. And when a visitor comes to the site, she will feel intuitively that this is a well-run business. The website will convey many hidden messages that will evoke trust. And trust is absolutely necessary for the success of your online business.
Navigation Systems
Second, a professional website designer has learned a lot about constructing navigation systems that work well and minimize confusion. When you are buying a website, a big part of what you are buying is a navigation system that is good enough to allow you to expand considerably before it becomes outmoded. The typical storeowner just doesn't have the experience to produce an excellent navigation system and user interface.
Planning for Ease of Maintenance
I have built literally hundreds of websites. What I've learned along the way is that you can create maintenance nightmares for yourself unless you design the site in a modular fashion. When I began, I would construct template pages and then insert my content into them. But the only way to change the design of the whole website would be to do a "global search-and-replace" on all the pages. Inevitably I would have made tiny changes in certain pages and they wouldn't update properly. The result was a humble-jumble headache. To fix it I would have to take my new template and manually insert webpage into it, one-by-one through the entire website.
In 1997 I learned about Server Side Includes (SSIs). Each SSI is an individual "boilerplate" file that makes up part of the whole template. At a minimum you have an SSI for the top of the webpage, one for the left menu, and another for the bottom. Computer nerds tell you that SSIs slow down the server, and that's true. But in my opinion computers are made to do grunt work. They certainly save a lot of time. Here is a simple template for my DoctorEbiz.com pages:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> -- Doctor Ebiz</TITLE>
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="">
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/deb-side.ssi" -->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/deb-top.ssi" -->
<CENTER><H2>
<!---- HEADLINE BELOW THIS LINE ---->
<!---- HEADLINE ABOVE THIS LINE ---->
</H2></CENTER>
<CENTER>by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Business Consultant</CENTER>
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/deb-mid.ssi" -->
<!-- TEXT BELOW THIS LINE -->
<!-- TEXT ABOVE THIS LINE -->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/deb-bot.ssi" -->
</BODY>
</HTML>
Each line such as <!--#include virtual="/ssi/deb-side.ssi" --> calls one of these boilerplate files and places it into the file before your visitor's browser sees it. The beauty of this is that it takes changing only a single file to effect a change on every page of your website. It is extremely powerful.
When I think of how much work I used to do to maintain my sites, I've decided never again to build a website without SSIs.
The problem is that the average storeowner just doesn't have the experience to build this kind of system. It looks deceivingly simple, but there are little SSI gremlins that like to taunt you. Insist that your website designer builds your site with SSIs (or "include" statements, as FrontPage 2000 calls them). The time you save in maintenance will be very substantial. You can learn more about SSIs in Craig McFetridge's SSI Tutorial http://www.carleton.ca/~dmcfet/html/ssi.html
For the three reasons listed above:
- A professional look that builds trust,
- A well-designed navigation system, and
- Server Side Includes to simplify maintenance
I recommend hiring a professional to build your website.
Move Maintenance In-House
But, just as strongly, I believe that you, or someone in your business, needs to learn HTML well enough to maintain your website. That is, to change the text, add a picture, and add pages to the webpage system. Anything beyond that you could ask your designer to do for you. You can learn to do this at an inexpensive community college class or from a how-to-do-it book such as Elizabeth Castro's HTML 4 for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide (4th edition, Peachpit Press, 2000) http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201354934/wilsoninternetse or Nolan Hester's FrontPage 2000 For Windows: Visual Quickstart Guide (Peachpit Press, 1999). http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201354578/wilsoninternetse Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool such as FrontPage 2000 makes this rather easy.
In far too many cases a designer will produce a great website, but it becomes obsolete and non-functional because the siteowner or his 17-year-old son didn't bother to learn to maintain the site. In-house maintenance is a must.
What Kind of Designer Should You Look For?
For a well-funded e-business you'll probably want to hire a well-established website design shop that employs a number of individuals, each with a particular specialty. However, for a shoestring website, you can probably find an individual who works out of her home and produces very nice websites for smaller businesses in the $1,000 to $2,000 range. Find these people by telephoning the local dial-up ISPs and ask if they know of any good freelance website designers in the area. Also ask at your local Chamber of Commerce and print shop. Look in the Yellow Pages under "Web Site Services," "Web Page Design," or "Internet-Marketing Services." Look in the search engines for "web design" in your local community, or a nearby city. When you find the person or business, explain what you want, and then ask to see other similar small business websites she has built. If she hasn't built any, pass her by and find someone who has. You're paying for experience. Get the phone numbers of a couple of these former clients and ask them about the process and how well the website designer worked out.
Clear Agreements and Specified Payments
I recommend putting an agreement into writing, with milestone dates and payments attached to them. A clear agreement will save you lots of headaches and keep the arrangement on a business footing. I still have online some forms and contracts I used when I was in the website design business. http://wilsonweb.com/worksheet/
Hosting and Domains
Many website designers would like to do your website hosting for you, as this creates an additional income for them. However, if you need to move to another server, it can sometimes be very sticky. I would encourage you to specify a nationally known web hosting service, such as Lexiconn Internet Services, http://lexiconn.com HostPro.com, http://www.hostpro.com or Interland.com. http://www.interland.com Make sure you get some basic instructions on how to upload and download files using FTP, and get the password to your website before making the final payment. Also insist that your name is listed as both the administrative and billing contact for your domain name, and that your company -- not your website designer's company -- is listed as the owner of the domain.
A number of legitimate website designers both host client websites and keep their names as administrators of the domain names in order to take good care of their clients. But I've heard too many horror stories to be comfortable with this arrangement. Hold those accounts in your own name if possible. The only exception is this: if your website requires interface with a database, then take your designer's advice on hosting, since databases need special care.
Yes, it is possible to build a website without a designer, but make sure you know what you are giving up when you do so. Trust from your customers is paramount. If your shoestring operation means your website looks too pitiful to build trust, then you've cut a corner that will keep you from succeeding. My advice: find a website designer to build your initial small business website, and then plan on doing your own website maintenance after that.
