Websites
The pitfalls of using a designer to build an expensive, unchanging website
This will probably upset a whole industry: Web designers. But that can’t be helped given that the work they do does an incredible amount of damage to small business. And the reasons for this and the consequences for the marketing of small business need to be brought into the open. A website is incredibly important for advertising your small business, but not the sort of websites web designers persist in creating.
The Tragedy of Web Designers
Web Designers are being impacted by technology shifts like many other trades and professions. The industry became a lot smaller, and many of the current players will soon vanish. Essentially web design grew up as a cottage industry—thousands of small businesses in inner city warehouses and terrace houses. Lots of young people and lots of piercings and spiky hair involved.
The industry grew up around people setting up small businesses, often with just one or two staff and then creating websites for clients using the various software applications available. Most of them built little templates that they then used to create the sites, and would customize them for a fee. And every time a client wanted to make a change or add some new function, it would take them a few (or many) hours, at an exorbitant rate. So the clients would only do it if they had to and most ended up with unchanging, static sites; the sort that the all-important Google hates.
Meanwhile technology was bounding ahead, and huge open source platforms were being created. And thousands of programmers were adding to these platforms, perfecting them and writing applications, modules and templates to make these free platforms more powerful. Building websites for SMEs was suddenly really easy and they could do things that even the websites of multinational corporations couldn’t do six or seven years ago.
And back in the funky warehouse, the now not so young designer is looking increasingly like a dinosaur as all the new powerful low cost and free plug-ins don’t work in their templates.
The tragedy is not that they are going out of business. The tragedy is the millions of small businesses like my mate Ralph…
The morning that I’m writing this (Oct 19th 2009) he was proudly showing a group of business owners his new website and we all agreed it looked pretty good. After the meeting I asked him what the backend was and what the site had cost. Well the price was OK as it was quite a big site—it cost just $2000.
The problem was the lack of a working ‘backend’: It was created from scratch by a couple of students working out of their inner city terrace house. Unfortunately his content needs to be updated at least every two or three weeks as new information becomes available – I asked how they were going to update it, and his answer was that the students would do it for him! What a nightmare of ongoing time and money waste that he doesn’t have the ability to edit and add pages himself. He doesn’t have access to his own Content Management System, or CMS.
Without a CMS the process is really cumbersome: He has to book time with them; write and then send the copy and the photos; then liaise with them for when it is up; review and edit it; send it to them; then approve the final copy.
As these web designers are students, which is where the low cost appeal has come from in the first place, he has to wait for them to be willing to even do business when it suits them.
All a website for an SME has to have is:
- A neat and professional look
- The ability to capture contact details in a database that can be sorted, emailed, exported, etc
- The ability to send visitors who register an email or email sequence
- A blog built into the site
- A really simple, “even my 80 year old technophobe uncle can use it” editing system (a CMS), where even he can create new pages
This isn’t hard to achieve, and it all this functionality can be done free of charge. One of the best free platforms for building and running a website (easily, we swear) is Joomla! (www.Joomla.org).
As a small business owner or manager, don’t make the web designer’s tragedy yours! We build all our client’s sites in Joomla and they have full functionality. And $2000 would be a big website for us.