My experiences of this last week have reinforced my views regarding DIY website design and why it’s a better use of time and resource for most entrepreneurs to work closely with a friendly web design company than spend too much time doing it themselves.
At this point I should point out that one of my partners, Helix Websites, is such a company so you may feel I have a particular axe to grind with this post. I hope you’ll accept the post as friendly advice and not just a blatant sales pitch for them and highfivebusiness.com.
Now that is out of the way I’ll explain.
Although my business has been going for a while, the demands of 24/7 business/paperwork et al plus a young family meant the website had not progressed beyond a basic idea. So a week ago the wheels were put in motion to go virtual !
I knew what I wanted to do from a look and feel perspective and had a clear idea on the content mix but I still had to decide how the site was going to be developed.
I wanted a website development tool that was easily supported, had plenty of options for the future and had some integral blogging capability too. Too many websites are fairly static in nature and I wanted to have the capability to easily amend the ‘static’ content and also easily add posts to the blog element of the website.
A number of solutions stood out from the crowd and I was left with a short-list of Drupal and WordPress. Both have their strong points and I opted for WordPress because most of the feedback I read implied it was more user friendly. If you are after a sales pitch regarding the benefits of Drupal particularly for websites that need a fair amount of functionality then there is plenty of info on the web or indeed contact Jonathan at Helix because I can’t stop him raving about the benefits of it.
Having played with WordPress on its own site I was sold. Next stop was to strike a deal with Helix for them to provide me hosting space and email services. They setup the environment extremely quickly with WordPress also installed on one of their servers. There are literally thousands of WordPress ‘themes’ available to customize the website that a user interacts with. A lot are for free although I ended up paying for the ‘Thesis’ theme this site uses because of Jonathan’s recommendation and the functionality it has.
To check out Thesis then follow the link below
I wanted a clean, minimalist feel for my site but Thesis is so customizable that you would not recognize other web sites built on it as sharing the same ‘parentage’ as mine !
Although WordPress and Thesis are sold as out of the box packages they do require a certain level of knowledge to manage past issues that arise. Without that initial knowledge you can lose a lot of time researching, playing and eventually getting rather frustrated. I now know this from personal experience. Thankfully Jonathan came to the rescue a good number of times with sound advice and configuration tips. Elsewhere on www.highfivebusiness.com I mention that ROI is measured these days in not just dollars or pounds but also in minutes and hours. I realise that without the help I received so far, the opportunity cost of working the site myself would have far outweighed the gains for at least quite some time.
So my lessons learnt from the last week are;
- If you want your website to be easily maintainable, extensible (so that new functions can be added in the future without starting from scratch) and supported then go with a technology that is based on open source or an open application programming interface.
- Save a lot of time in set up and ongoing site management by getting professional help up front. A good website/internet marketing professional is as important to your business as your accountant or lawyer. I recommend not relying on faceless corporations for this type of service. Get to know the people beforehand because your web presence over time will become an integral part of how you attract and interact with your potential and existing clients. How a site is initially setup helps immeasurably with how search engines index (search engine optimization) the contents and rank your site. My site is highly SEO compliant from day one which should save me a lot of heartache in the future.
- And finally and most importantly. Before you get too excited about the presentation and logistics of the site (eg it’s fun buying stuff like domains et al) work with a colleague/friend or professional business partner (that’s an ad for me) to;
- scope out who the audience of your site is,
- what messages you want them to receive
- how you want the site visitor to interact further with your business (eg placing an order, requesting online information, a representative calling back etc)
This up front planning and focus means that once all the technical components are in place you can have your content uploaded and site launched quickly. Doing it the wrong way round can create unfocussed sites that lack direction where more often than not site visitors don’t return.
