Web Design And Web Development For Small Businesses

As a small business owner you wear many hats during the day, sometimes business is good and you're short handed but don't need hassle of employing more staff, sometimes business is slow. A well designed website with proper SEO can drive more targetted cutomers to your business but your website can also take over some of the more mundane, unprofitable tasks you have to do. Obviously the "where are you" and "are you open" type questions are easily answered on a website but if for example your business involves giving estimates or quotes and you use some type of software on your PC, even if it's Excel, then this can be moved to your website and customers can do 99% of the work instead. This can be fully automatic, ie the customer sees the quote immediately or semi-manual, you get the information first and can call the customer and then send them the quote. The quote can be just a price, a full bill of materials or cutting list for the factory floor. Your webserver is probably the most powerful computer in your business - it's time to make full use of it.

Web Design Or Web Development?

The term "web design" is a bit of a misnomer, we are primarily web developers. Web design is just the look and feel - a web designer is a graphic artist who can do page layout. Web developers can program too, we build websites, but "web design" is what 99% of people will search for so "web design" it is - but it is the equivalent of searching for an interior designer/painter and decorator to build your house when you actually wanted an architect or builder. In your search for web design you'll have probably noticed Step 1 of any web design as "Discuss colour and layout with client" or something similar - if your architect/builder arrived with boxes of colour swatches or wanted to know whether you prefer brass or chrome door knobs you'd sense someting was wrong but in building websites this appears normal. Step 1 is always about getting targetted visitors to your website.

Get A Free Website!

We were warned by a few people not to put our web development prices on this website because other web design companies would undercut us, which if price is your only concern is true. But if price is your only criteria why not get a free website - just do a Google search for "free website", there are 100's, even Google themselves do free websites. If your graphic design skills are not up to scratch try "free templates" or "free CSS templates" - this is where most cut-price web designers get there's from anyway. These free sitebuilders are OK for your daughter's pony pictures, or you want somewhere to talk about your vintage camera collection or if you just want some experience, but they are not for serious business websites that make a profit. Check them out - most show some sort of portfolio of websites built, it is easy to see what the creators are trying to sell themselves as, usually the tagline at the top of the page, then do a Google search for that phrase and see which page they appear on before you get bored clicking past page 10 - we even found web designers using these free sites for their own website, that should set alarm bells ringing if the best they can do is use some free website builder - maybe they're only 12 years old and don't have a credit card to buy proper web hosting. The barriers to entry of web design are very low, anyone can do it, even the bloke who prints your business cards has probably added "web design" to his list of services - building a bad website is easy, building an effective website that adds value & profit to your business isn't.

Whatever business you are in there are always some people who will DIY, competitors who are cheaper with an inferior product or the new and inexperienced who quote cheap just to get the work but invariably run out of cash before the job is done and have to start the next job just to keep the cashflow going. Paying too little for a website is worse than paying too much - half a website still under construction is totally useless, an expensive one will actually work.

From our sales pitch you might think we are trying to design & develop every website in Harrogate, Leeds, York or Yorkshire - actually the oposite, we are about quality over quantity so intend to design & build 1-2 websites a month, maybe 20 in total for 2010. HIgh quality, high performance websites, built up to a specification not down to the minimum price.

Checklist For Making Changes To Your Website

• When looking at different web design packages from different web designers ask to be shown how to add, remove or change elements that make up the website. It doesn't matter if you don't understand fully what is exactly happening but  if you could do it easily or if it something only your web designer can do and how much these changes will cost - the "Razor Blade" business model is quite common, cheap entry then months and years of expensive changes - maybe that should be renamed the "Printer Ink" model these days!
• Ask to be shown how to add a new paragraph of text, add an image, change an image, move it to the right.
• How to add a new page and add it to the navigation.
• How to add an new element to an existing form - "Company Name" to the contact form for example.
• How to create a whole new form from scratch and add it to a page and make the email response.
• Change the address, telephone, copyright information.
• Change the page title and meta tags.
• Change the colours, fonts and graphic look, maybe a new company logo at the top.
• Add links from the home page to a deeper page.
• How to add Google Analytics or Google Verification.
• How to add/change/delete email addresses.
  

Remember even if your web design company is doing the work and charging for it, you still have to prepare the images and text and email it to them - that's the benefit of using a CMS you write the content once straight into the website.

A different analogy for using a CMS yourself or having your web designer do it is the same as taking a Taxi or owning your car. Taking a taxi has little or no upfront cost but you pay dearly for every mile - owning your car has a high initial price but is only pennies per mile, depends whether you intend doing 10 miles per year or 10,000.

eBay - A Content Management System

eBay is a good example of content management, if you've never sold anything on eBay then find a couple of items from your attic and get them listed on eBay. You will have to take some photos and write a keyworded description then using the eBay CMS enter all this information, your price, shipping and payment details. A CMS driving your website is very similar, you enter the information directly, not email it to somebody else to enter. Within a week you will have learned alot and hopefully sold your unwanted Xmas presents. 

From eBay's point of view it's also a Web Application - you as a customer are doing all the work and paying eBay for the privledge! Since eBay started it has also amassed a colosal amount of information, 15 years worth containing the selling price of millions of auction items, search and shopping data of millions of people. How valuable is that? How valuable would all your website visitors/customers/sales information be to your business? Without a database driven CMS you can't collect any information at all.