Why you don't want the kid down the street to make your website.
In my business, I talk with big and small clients all the time about their marketing and advertising efforts and specifically their websites. I am often surprised that a minority of these otherwise perfectly capable business people have trusted their website to the kid down the street, a brother-in-law or the cheapest developer they could find. The results have ranged from frustration to unmitigated disaster.
I have heard of major corporations being held captive as the rights to their URL’s are owned by their web development company, that the software used to create their site was proprietary and can’t be moved, updated or repaired, that the servers hosting their site mysteriously vanished taking their site down with them or that the Brother-in-law, who has taken over two years to produce three pages, has found a new job and can’t finish their site.
Would you trust your inventory control system or POS to anyone other than a professional, what about your accounting or sales management? I thought not.
Over 80% of the population and over 90% of businesses check you out online long before they pick up the phone and call you. Can you trust this first point of contact with your business to that pimply teenager eating nachos and building your site to death metal in the middle of the night?
So here are Chris’s Top 10 reasons to have your site built by a professional.
1. W3C compliance: You want to find a web development team that complies with the standards set down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as this will ensure that your site appears as it should across all platforms and browsers.
2. Clean code: Many amateur builders use off-the-shelf web development software packages or use others code as a starting point. Good developers use open source programs like PHP and MySQL when programming ensuring that you are not limited by the software and that the site is transferable between developers. Cleanly coded sites load faster, rarely break and are ranked higher by the search engines.
3. Website Navigation: your site should be completely intuitive to move through. No one should have to guess or be forced to back out of the site. Redundant pages need to be removed and core information must be easily accessed. If your development team does not provide a site plan before building anything run away screaming.
4. Vision: Great developers are thinking ahead. Did you know that sites that show (video) rather than tell (text) are ranking higher on popular Search Engines? Does your developer understand the ever-changing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques?
5. Trend Spotting: Your development team should be able to explain the latest trends online. “Green” products and companies are being challenged online. If you intend to talk-the-talk you better be prepared to walk-the-walk and ensure that not only is your product green but your business practices are green too. Does you team get how to make use of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to broaden your appeal?
6. Design: Keeping your site clean, simple and fresh makes it easy to use, beautiful and engaging. If your developer wants to place anything that flashes, plays music, or screams at the user find someone else… please. When you’ve picked a design team let them design and don’t micro-manage, they are the professionals, respect their suggestions.
7. Link: GOOGLE hates sites that are a dead-end and will punish you immediately by ranking your site lower. Link to others and beg them to link back. It is a world-wide-web after all.
8. Build a site that is data-driven meaning that the backend of your site is a database and as pages are called up the database provides the pieces needed to build each page. Data driven sites ensure that you only need to store your address and phone number once and even if it is needed on a variety of pages it comes from a single source.
9. Purchase a Content Management System that allows you to go into your site and change, text, images, links, headlines, pricing, etc. without damaging the site in any way. This may be slightly more expensive initially, but you will more than make up for it in the mid to long-term as you keep your site fresh and active.
10. Content is still KING! Hire a good writer, make the copy short, sharp and interesting. Get a great tagline. Be educational. Change something on your site weekly. Your design team knows what to do on the front page to ensure that the little robots that roam the web looking at websites for the major search engine will find your new site, properly reference and rank it. They know what to say and how to say it.
Web development is an ever-evolving profession. The way the search engines rank sites is a closely guarded secret and talented web developers spend a great deal of time maximizing their client’s sites to ensure they retain their results.
Your web development team needs to become your ongoing partner, rather than a onetime supplier. You need to be talking with them every few months to ensure that your window to the world stays current, relevant, and well used.
Trying to do it yourself or asking someone inexperienced to handle it for you is a recipe for disaster. My phone rings weekly with clients who have taken a shortcut only to find that their key marketing piece is off-line, broken or worse yet inaccessible because the person that did it for them has moved on or the site they purchased can’t be changed or updated.
Chris Brown
I have heard of major corporations being held captive as the rights to their URL’s are owned by their web development company, that the software used to create their site was proprietary and can’t be moved, updated or repaired, that the servers hosting their site mysteriously vanished taking their site down with them or that the Brother-in-law, who has taken over two years to produce three pages, has found a new job and can’t finish their site.
Would you trust your inventory control system or POS to anyone other than a professional, what about your accounting or sales management? I thought not.
Over 80% of the population and over 90% of businesses check you out online long before they pick up the phone and call you. Can you trust this first point of contact with your business to that pimply teenager eating nachos and building your site to death metal in the middle of the night?
So here are Chris’s Top 10 reasons to have your site built by a professional.
1. W3C compliance: You want to find a web development team that complies with the standards set down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as this will ensure that your site appears as it should across all platforms and browsers.
2. Clean code: Many amateur builders use off-the-shelf web development software packages or use others code as a starting point. Good developers use open source programs like PHP and MySQL when programming ensuring that you are not limited by the software and that the site is transferable between developers. Cleanly coded sites load faster, rarely break and are ranked higher by the search engines.
3. Website Navigation: your site should be completely intuitive to move through. No one should have to guess or be forced to back out of the site. Redundant pages need to be removed and core information must be easily accessed. If your development team does not provide a site plan before building anything run away screaming.
4. Vision: Great developers are thinking ahead. Did you know that sites that show (video) rather than tell (text) are ranking higher on popular Search Engines? Does your developer understand the ever-changing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques?
5. Trend Spotting: Your development team should be able to explain the latest trends online. “Green” products and companies are being challenged online. If you intend to talk-the-talk you better be prepared to walk-the-walk and ensure that not only is your product green but your business practices are green too. Does you team get how to make use of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to broaden your appeal?
6. Design: Keeping your site clean, simple and fresh makes it easy to use, beautiful and engaging. If your developer wants to place anything that flashes, plays music, or screams at the user find someone else… please. When you’ve picked a design team let them design and don’t micro-manage, they are the professionals, respect their suggestions.
7. Link: GOOGLE hates sites that are a dead-end and will punish you immediately by ranking your site lower. Link to others and beg them to link back. It is a world-wide-web after all.
8. Build a site that is data-driven meaning that the backend of your site is a database and as pages are called up the database provides the pieces needed to build each page. Data driven sites ensure that you only need to store your address and phone number once and even if it is needed on a variety of pages it comes from a single source.
9. Purchase a Content Management System that allows you to go into your site and change, text, images, links, headlines, pricing, etc. without damaging the site in any way. This may be slightly more expensive initially, but you will more than make up for it in the mid to long-term as you keep your site fresh and active.
10. Content is still KING! Hire a good writer, make the copy short, sharp and interesting. Get a great tagline. Be educational. Change something on your site weekly. Your design team knows what to do on the front page to ensure that the little robots that roam the web looking at websites for the major search engine will find your new site, properly reference and rank it. They know what to say and how to say it.
Web development is an ever-evolving profession. The way the search engines rank sites is a closely guarded secret and talented web developers spend a great deal of time maximizing their client’s sites to ensure they retain their results.
Your web development team needs to become your ongoing partner, rather than a onetime supplier. You need to be talking with them every few months to ensure that your window to the world stays current, relevant, and well used.
Trying to do it yourself or asking someone inexperienced to handle it for you is a recipe for disaster. My phone rings weekly with clients who have taken a shortcut only to find that their key marketing piece is off-line, broken or worse yet inaccessible because the person that did it for them has moved on or the site they purchased can’t be changed or updated.
Chris Brown
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