So you want a web site...

The first thing to ask is, why? Web sites have lots of reasons for existence, but for business purposes, we tend to see some combination of four motivations:

• To act as an online brochure

• To attract new customers from search engines

• To sell things online

• To build a community of people who might someday buy something from you

A web site can do any or all of these, but generally the further down this list you get, the more the site is going to cost in terms of development cost and your time. 

Web Site as Online Brochure

All businesses need a web site. It's as crucial as having a Yellow Pages listing a couple decades ago-it's the first place more and more people will look to find your address, phone number, and contact details. If you have nothing more than a single page with the basics about your business, it's important to have at least that.

Your web site should not only tell your potential customers how to get ahold of you, but also why they should. What products or services do you sell? Who are your customers? Why do people buy from you instead of your competition?

A web site that answers those questions and nothing more is a sales tool. You are not likely to get new sales leads from such a basic web site, but it can help you close sales for prospects who already know who you are. When you put together such a site, you'll need to consider your business brand, and there's a couple of radically different schools of thought here:

1. Brand matters

2. Brand doesn't matter, but personal reputation does

The old school of thought is that companies develop a brand that is supposed to represent its values. The danger of this approach is letting the trappings of a brand-the logo, the slogans, the marketing material-matter more than delivering those values. It's like worshiping idols instead of the gods they represent-sooner or later you're gonna get smote.

The newer school of thought is eloquently expressed in an essay called "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and espoused by many new thinkers and thought leaders, such as Seth Godin, one of our favorite current marketing writers. The gist is that graphics, logos, all the rest of these trappings are completely irrelevant, that nothing but content-your quality of service, your core products-matters. Their approach is minimalist-use freely available tools to build your web site, don't spend on graphic design, instead just make sure you take care of your customers.

Of course, we think delivering quality service is important, but having a coherent brand can help. Especially if you're trying to develop a consistent customer experience. Ignoring graphics, domain names, even business names, is fine for personality-driven businesses, but if you are trying to grow a business to be something more than the sum of its personalities, you need a visual identity that's consistently expressed in your web site, your printed material, your contracts, in everything.

You can get started with a web site at your ISP, or a blog on a hosted service, for next to nothing more than a few hours of your time. We recommend that as soon as you can work it into your budget, hire a graphic designer to put together a business identity and a basic web site that incorporates it. Expect to spend around $3000 to get something unique that expresses what you want your business to represent, though this price can vary substantially depending on the web designer you choose, how well you can express your ideas to your designer, and how intricate and detailed your design ends up. You can find cheaper solutions, such as cookie-cutter designs, pre-built templates, or off-shore design to get something going for a few hundred dollars-but it will definitely show. Depending on the values you are trying to represent with your brand, this may or may not be a good thing.

Prices for web design can vary by a huge amount. We recommend finding a designer with a portfolio of designs you like, interviewing them to see how well you can work with them to make your ideas a reality, and decide what you're willing to spend up front. Setting a budget for a web designer is perhaps the best way to go. Intricate designs take time to develop, which costs money-start with a logo and an overall concept, and refine until you're happy or have reached your budget.

But before going crazy with design, read this post by Seth Godin for guidelines on what to put on your web site (and follow his suggestions for other places to post content).

We provide simple brochure web site hosting for $108 a year, or $162 with email. We can add a blog page to your simple brochure site for a flat $200 setup fee, if you're hosting with us.

Beyond an e-Brochure: Getting business from your web site

Just having a web site, however, does nothing to get customers beating down your doors. People need to find your web site somehow, amidst the millions of other web sites out there. For small, local businesses, they don't find your web site online--they find it from your business card, a sign on your car, word-of-mouth, or all the rest of the traditional ways people market their business.

If you want your web site to actually generate business for you, recognize that it's going to take a substantial investment in your time, more than anything else. The critical ingredient in getting your site noticed by search engines is content. The more, the better--especially if it's interesting, relevant, and unique. Having new, original content on your site helps it in two ways:

1. It's more raw material for Google and the other search engines to index. Sheer quantity helps.

2. If you're a decent writer, and write something useful, people will return to your site to see what you write next, and some will link to your pages.

Google is basically a popularity contest: it places the highest value on pages with the most links coming from other sites. Create a page that people want to read, and eventually it will boost your rank on Google. Create a bunch of pages, and soon you'll be at the top of the search engines, and start to get business over the Internet.

You can jump-start online marketing by buying advertising. Pay-per-click ads work, and don't cost all that much. But nothing beats the organic results you get by growing your site with regular additions of new content.

If you need a system to make it easy to add stories to your site on a regular basis, that's where Freelock Computing can help. We work extensively with Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Word Press, and Serendipity, different systems that make it simple for you to manage your own content without needing a technical background. We regularly deploy, customize, host, and provide training for these systems. Let us know if we can help!

Brick and Order: Selling online

Many people suggest having some sort of "call to action" on every page of your site, whether you actually sell online or not. If your web site is for a business, you almost certainly want people to take some action, some small step that might eventually lead to a sale. Even if your product or service doesn't lend itself to online sales, your web site can help develop a relationship with potential customers, help them gain trust in your expertise or familiarity with your services.

But if your products can be sold online, you almost certainly should set up some sort of online shopping cart. The more specialized your business, the more unique your products, the more potential customers you can find online.

The Internet can put distant customers on your virtual doorstep. Having a friendly, inviting catalog online can greatly expand your customer base, and there are some great tools out there to make developing such a site affordable.

At Freelock, we recommend and deploy Drupal with the Ubercart module for e-commerce.

Growing a Community

By far the most audacious goal you might have for a web site is to make a place where people hang out and talk to each other. Many, many businesses are learning that this is a great way to cultivate a devoted following, but it takes a lot of work.

Community web sites are like gardens. It takes some fertilizer, regular watering, and someone to pull weeds to make a vibrant community grow. If your business is large enough to devote a major part of somebody's time to keep a community site in good shape, it can pay off with enthusiastic support of your business.

Opening a web site to direct interaction with your customers can be difficult for a lot of businesses. You need to be open to criticism as well as praise, willing to allow the world to see the warts on your business. But doing so nearly always helps people trust your business, and makes them more willing to do business with you.

What sort of work is involved? Quite a bit:

• writing stories and inviting comment on them

• Responding to criticism and praise, both in a professional, business-like way

• Deleting spam, or moderating posts (I recommend only moderating spam, not negative posts)

• Generally making yourself available to your customers online

If you can't put the time into managing such a site, I would suggest simplifying your goals, go with a marketing or an e-commerce site. Community sites are hard, and there's not much worse for your business brand than a forum filled with spam, or negative posts that go unanswered.

But there's not much better than having a community of vociferous fans of your business-they'll help you with sales, marketing, and support.

We're helping several companies put together or manage community-based web sites. Joomla has a number of common add-ons we deploy for this purpose-Community Builder and Fireboard provide a solid base of user profiles and forums. For more specialized web sites, Drupal is a more powerful content management system that makes a fine base for building entire custom applications.

 

Choosing a web site vendor

Lastly, a few words about hiring a web developer. There are lots of us around, with a wide range of prices. What one company can do for $2,000, another might be able to do for $10,000, and you might be able to get someone in India to do for $500. But the end result won't be the same for any of these.

Spending more doesn't always mean you'll get a better result, either. Open Source software greatly lowers the entry cost to get powerful web sites, though these often result in a steeper learning curve to figure out how to use effectively.

The best way to find a good web developer is to ask people you know and trust for a recommendation. Make sure you talk to people who have worked with the web developer to get a sense for how the process went, and how satisfied they were with the results. There are two different skills used in putting together a web site: the graphical side, and the technical side. You need both, and you don't tend to find both in the same person. Make sure your graphics person "gets" what you are trying to express, and make sure your technical person can explain things in terms you understand. These factors are far more important to the ultimate success of your web site, than the cost you pay up front.

So, here's the final checklist of how to put together a great web site for your business:

1. Decide upon your goals for the web site, what type of web site you want to create.

2. Ask friends, colleagues, family members for recommendations to find a web designer and developer you can work with. You might also be able to find a developer by contacting the owner of a site you particularly like.

3. Interview your potential web designer and developer. Ask to see samples of their work, and to talk with prior customers. For the designer, look for designs you like, and how well you connect with the designer-design can be extremely subjective, and you want someone who will deliver what you're looking for. For the developer, make sure they're competent, and that they can clearly explain what needs to be done and what your options are.

4. Once you've decided upon the people, determine if they can do the job within your budget, and if so, you're off and running!