Color Cop: One of the best tools a Web Designer or IT Guy can use. This utility comes in mighty handy to identify RGB and Hex colors on the project or website you're working on. This easy-to-use tool takes up almost no real estate. Best of all, it's FREE!]]>
Your website is an expensive piece of equipment
An online store is very much a sophisticated machine, usually custom-built, and painstakingly constructed of thousands of lines of programming code, HTML and style sheets with a sturdy database backbone. All of this sits on a secure server foundation that provides access to your products or services 24 hours of every day. Creating this specialized piece of equipment probably cost a lot of time and money.
As a Web store owner, you depend on your website for every dime of revenue that is generated online. It's an automated order taking, customer creating, product selling, money making computer apparatus par excellence. Without this machine, you got nada online. It stops; your Web business stops.
It doesn't clatter like a machine maybe it's just a parking spot for a vision statement
Your online store doesn't rattle, hum or vibrate. There are no sparks, no splashes of incandescent material and no odor of grease, oil or burning rubber. You can't get your hand caught in it. You don't need a hard hat, eye protection or noise abatement to watch it at work on your computer monitor. In fact, it doesn't ACT like a machine at all. And that folks is precisely the problem.
See, business owners tend to completely ignore the health and well-being of their online business power plant. It's true. After all, what's to worry about? To non-techies, this website thingy floats out there all pristine-like in some sort of timeless cyber womb. I'll bet some crew built your store 5 years ago and not a single darn person has looked under the hood since. Right? Come on. Admit it!
Oh sure. You've updated your contact page. You've even added some products and changed the prices. (You feed in the raw material and out pops the money.) But, there's been absolutely no maintenance done. No one is keeping you up-to-date. I'm talking about overhauling the core software development framework. I'm referring to your site's compliance with web standards and accessibility issues. Perhaps most importantly, I'm suggesting your consider just how safe and secure your web store is from hackers and thieves intent on destroying your Web machine.
The 'information superhighway' is littered with poorly-maintained wrecks
See with a website, everything seems perfect till it crashes. There's no rust to mar the presentation. The Home Page isn't dented. Well, maybe the text has somehow become skewed or an image doesn't resolve anymore. But, who notices that?
Yet, like an motor running low on oil, one day it'll finally seize up. How's that? Well for instance, was your online store created a few years back using ColdFusion application technology? Uh oh: You may want to prepare for a massive database failure called "SQL Injection." Never heard of it, huh?
I can tell you about more than a few calls I've received from anguished online entrepreneurs who, to their everlasting regret, were under the impression that their eCommerce site was a perpetual motion system that never needs attention. Whoops, C-r-a-s-h! One poor woman from New York sobbed in tears as she related that her whole enterprise had collapsed in just days as her site was ruthlessly hacked. A business man from Atlanta was stunned to find his website totally unusable for the same reason. A profitable online store based in New Jersey was horror-struck when its 10-year-old technology was hacked and destroyed over one weekend. And, B-u-r-n! Customer lists gone. Databases useless and unrecoverable. Websites shut down. Every one of them was suddenly and completely at a standstill.
Worst of all, they all had to come up with many thousands of dollars to replace their online machine, or decide to go permanently out of business. Very sad.
Yep, website maintenance makes sense, but there's a major problem
Now we finally get to the heart of the matter: Money.
You, of course, know perfectly well that every business that operates machines must maintain their equipment. It doesn't matter whether that machinery is a pizza oven at your local take-out or a robotic assembly system at a Ford's Chicago plant. In fact, the same thing goes for our cars, home furnace and lawnmowers. But, all that maintenance is in the budget. I mean, you know ahead of time - when you buy the damn thing, it's going to cost you to maintain it.
But, a website? Who the hell plans to maintain a website? Not only that, but the whole concept of actually paying some Web developer money to perform essential maintenance is - way too uncool to contemplate. The fact that some geeks actually charged real money to build it in the first place was over the top. Now they want money to "maintain" it? "Whadda they gotta do anyway?" "How hard is it to fiddle with something so simple anyway?" "If I need maintenance, I'll have that nephew of mine do it. Can't be that hard..."
And that folks is precisely the problem
Ah yes. It's that old familiar problem. Professional websites cost. They cost to build and then you do need to maintain them. Still, quite a few well-educated business people don't give site maintenance a second thought or a spare dime. That includes people who should know better like information technology managers. Many of the very same managers who so prudently invest time and capital in the upkeep of their physical plant totally ignore their online business application. Because it's just a website.
So, now that you know your website is a critically important machine vital to the success of your business, please think about taking care of it. Or, get ready to spend many unbudgeted thousands to completely replace it.
]]>First, you need a website.
Of course. You knew that. Ya gotta have a website to be online.
But, do you know what that means exactly? If your understanding of website creation derives from your perspective of, say, a typical Microsoft Word document with a few pictures thrown in, you need to spend a lot more time researching your plan.
Come on. Professional web design and development takes a lot more expertise and talent then putting together a simple print brochure. And, you're website is going to need a lot more than a pretty presentation. Your business will need a sophisticated, secure eCommerce application with a robust database running in a secure server environment.
Sorry for the cold water. But, really: I can't tell you how many times I hear, "All I want to do is..." And, then the client points to Amazon.com. Yes indeed. Even very smart people make that remark. Do these people really think Amazon built their website with Microsoft Word? Of course not. But, a lot of folks DO believe their high school nephew knows how to do it. See?
The good news is your new eCommerce web application isn't anywhere near as difficult as planning, capitalizing and building a retail store or industrial plant location. For one thing, it's a heck of a lot less expensive. That means the relative 'risk' is a lot less than starting a brick and mortar business. Still serious about launching a business? Then let's get you online.
It ain't sale-priced: An online store is a sophisticated piece of programming
So, where do you start? Let's assume you've got a good product and a sound vision. So first start accumulating an adequate budget. You may have seen offers and prices that purport to create websites for just a pittance per month. Or, maybe you've been searching for so-called 'template' solutions that dovetail with your concept that web development shouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars. Forget it.
You need to be ready to spend $6,000 to $8,000 (read: 'What's a website worth?') to build and launch your business website. You should be prepared to engage a professional website development organization to create and test it. Now, you could easily spend a lot more if you're not careful. But, if you think that the very foundation upon which your new business will rest, its web application platform, is where you should cut corners, you're making a terrible and costly mistake.
Starting a new business online can be a very smart move
My strong recommendation is to do it right. Take time to understand the technology. Invest wisely. Just make sure you invest enough to get the job done properly.
Of course, that's a perfectly sound move in 2008. If you are going to start a new business, whether from home or from a 'brick-and-mortar' location, you'll need a website. Most savvy people realize that potential customers might never learn about their products and services without a website.
A website is a core business requirement.
For the most part, the business website has supplanted expensive 'yellow page' phone directory advertising, the printing costs for thousands of marketing brochures, direct mail campaigns, and, even the huge payroll overhead of a captive sales force. Why? Because, when people want something today, they go online to find it.
Okay... yes, we still use the yellow pages to order pizza or find a plumber in an emergency. And, brochures are always handy to give an undecided customer who doesn't own a computer. And yes, yes, some marketing applications (insurance comes to mind) still utilize sales people to cold call potential customers... But, let's face facts. Those tools are so horse-and-buggy. Today, your customers travel digitally.
But, there's a problem: Websites cost money. Isn't that odd?
The very idea sounds crazy to some people: "Websites cost money." You can almost sense the indignation coursing through the phone line: "Imagine someone actually profiting from designing and creating websites! How rude." Or, "It's not that I object to paying for a professional website, but even my 16-year old nephew can build a website, after all." Whatever. One thing is true, though. Guys actually do exist in this world who charge money to design and develop websites.
Ahhh...well. How did the web design business ever arrive at this sad dilemma? I don't really know, but I place most of the blame on Matthew Broderick. Yeah: The movie actor, Matthew Broderick. You remember. He was the kid in the 1983 movie "War Games" that showed the world how easy it was to use a computer to hack the Internet and start WWIII. Broderick began this whole "any smart kid can program a computer" thing. Look at where we are today: Name an action movie set in modern times that doesn't have a scene with some young person urgently tapping into a keyboard and (Ding!) 2 seconds later, out pops the identity of the NSA's most secret deep cover agent, or the Pentagon's plans for the invasion of Lichtenstein, or DuPont's latest diabolical climate-killing chemical formula. See? Computers are easy, especially for kids.
So, armed with this intelligence and prevailing world view, the careful, soon-to-be prospective business novice calls up the local web guy. The guy tells him he's looking at a couple of grand for a professional business web site. "Holy Cow! A couple of thousand dollars for a lousy website? Why, why I know a guy who'll do a website for $300 bucks! Jeez!" Conversation over. Business vision crushed.
As a web guy, I try to be philosophical. "Websites are a lot like cars." Want a BMW? Bring bucks. Just need a VW? Ah, well, bring bucks anyway. No, wait. Just need a junker? Bring, what? A grand - or two? Okay: That's probably a bad analogy.
Regardless, I am mystified. No one has this problem with the printer. You walk in there and it's a cool hundred for business cards on up to a couple of thousand if you want stationary. Oh, and by the way, that's one-color. Decent logo design? Ha! Count yourself lucky to get a bargain rate for $3200. Need a professional computer rig for your business? Well, a couple thousand more. Want to run any software on that computer? Another grand. Now, you need a website? That's going to be just $300 bucks? Come on.
But, we stray too far. So, what the hell does a website cost?
Well, a professional, custom-designed website with search engine optimization built-in costs around $3500. That price also gets the business owner full content editing capability. Ecommerce functionality (online store with shopping cart) and special programming will jack the price up considerably to around $6000. Regardless, $3500 is near the low end for professional design. I mean serious businesses pay tens of thousands for websites. Really.
The real question should be: "In the world of my business, what place does my website occupy." Ah ha! Answer that one and reality dawns. Today, your website is a critical component of your business. In some cases, the website IS the business. In most cases, the website plays an indispensible marketing and sales role vital to the profitability and success of the enterprise.
Websites cost money
The solution is: Whatever your budget for your new business, first and foremost, set aside a major portion to design and build your Internet presence. This isn't 1983, it's 2008. And, truthfully, most kids really don't have a clue how to design and build business websites.
]]>Good web design doesn't start with an IT guy
When it comes to websites there's a lot of very smart city folks who indulge in the illusion that any website should originate from and be completely dependent upon 'computer guys.' You know, the 'IT department.' The thought process goes like this, "After all, if it's on a computer screen, responsibility must belong to the same people who fix my laptop, connect me to the network, and console me about all that email spam. Right?"
Not really. You know when you think about it most of us understand that many "IT" guys are programmers. They generate technical code. We hire them to use a specialized language to communicate with and retrieve information from a database. They write applications that make data entry easier for the accounting department or crunch numbers for the annual report.
Other IT guys are 'server techs' that keep the bad stuff from messing up the company's computer network. And, yeah, some IT guys deal mainly with hardware issues. They can (sometimes) fix your laptop.
IT guys are tech specialists, not steely-eyed marketing pros
One thing they generally can't do is 'design.' They are certainly not graphic designers. You would no more assign them to do a brochure layout than you would the human resource manager. And, what can the average IT guy tell you about viral marketing or advertising metrics? So, we know they're not experts in business development. I mean, we're not dissing anyone when we direct the correct job to the right experts. So, why the heck do many businesses still hand off responsibility for their websites to IT guys?
One major reason could be that a lot of marketing managers are not experienced with the nuances of Web usability standards, search engine optimization and other aspects of good web design in 2008. Frankly, they are assuming that the IT guys know what they don't. But, that's wishful thinking. IT guys don't produce orange juice and they sure as sunshine don't grow customers.
Websites should start life in the marketing department
Websites are much more than the public face of an organization. Your website extends your reach to new markets and customers. The Internet empowers the customer to choose, or not, your products and services over those of your competitors. Your pages establish your reputation and credibility in your industry. A website can provide first-tier customer support, media relations and sales leads. It's about marketing, dude.
Here's my recommendations for any marketing manager considering their next moves with regard to their website:
So, what about your IT guys? Give 'em a break. Besides, they're all tied up trying to stop evil email spam from invading your inbox. Right?
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