Know what you are paying for when you work with your website designer."Most important of all, don't pay a website designer thousands of dollars to build you a website. You wouldn't pay $30 for a gallon of milk, so don't pay a website designer ten times what they're worth. Building a website isn't about technology or aesthetics, it's about content, and the only person who can create that content is you."
The insightful quotes in this post are from Morris Rosenthal at
fornerbooks.com, who speaks straight to the heart of many website overpayment and failed projects.
As a website designer, I've rescued too many clients as they leave behind a website and a design relationship that cost them tens of thousands of dollars and months of frustration. They find me because I'm recommended as an advocate or a consultant, and they're eager to get
something online. They're shocked to find their small business website through thebestwebdesigngroupever.com weigh in at $900 to $4,000 of work. They're surprised to see every hour of work logged in invoices. It's incredibly empowering to the client when they present a new idea to me, I bid the additional work, and we
get it online.
When I work with clients, I've found it best to meet and work together with them on their specific needs instead of fitting them into a general, preset plan. I know what the content housing needs actually are, my clients know what content they need to produce.
Know what you need to communicate online when you work with your website designer."A website designer who builds a pretty site and then asks you for some content to "populate" the pages with has done it all backwards, even if you had a dozen meetings to get to that point. It has to start with the content, around which you can design, or grow, a website."
A veritable expert on internet book marketing and self publishing, Rosenthal notes that he has "written a lot about search engine optimization and website design for publishers in the past, and it continues to come down to a couple basic principles. Write and publish high quality content and get relevant links."
This is the magic. Let's review the deep truth that Rosenthal espouses. Both website design and SEO efforts hinge on:
- quality material
- the housing and organization of the material
- relating to other such material online via inbound and outbound links
Do not think that this requires the client to write their material themselves. Writers abound. Clients can have their website successfully built via phone interviews and digestible reviews of the content produced. They run their business, someone else writes about it. The client controls the material without the time commitment to pen it themselves. I have access to many writers and love facilitating the generation of quality material.
Resist the temptation of being distracted from your business when you work with your website designer.One of the tasks clients unknowingly pick up with "get company website online" is to "learn everything about the internet" and it's overwhelmingly daunting. The very best thing a client can do to prepare for website construction is to know their business and to learn about their clients.
Some distractions include:
- thinking like a business owner instead of an actual website visitor
- how to appear on the first page of google
- coming up with the best website design ever
- coming up with the best website redesign ever (oh yes)
- coming up with the most website features ever
- making sure the site "has" SEO
- dreaming up what the company will do instead of communicating what it does now
- deciding to write all the website content in house (often a 6 month delay)
- polling non-critical decision makers and miring the entire website construction process
- social not working social networking
"So what can a professional SEO company actually do for a publisher? For starters, it depends on how bad a job you've done for yourself. If you've published your website with a content management system or web authoring package that doesn't take search engine visibility into account, they can point that out to you and help you migrate your website to a different platform. Of course, you can figure that out for yourself as well by just checking if your pages appear in Google and looking at your page titles. An SEO professional can certainly point out if you or your designer has done things that search engines consider bad practice, and which get you penalized. But some SEO professionals follow bad practices themselves, to get their clients a short lived bump in the search rankings and prove that they've "earned" their pay.... after getting your content right, it's all about the links."
There is the secret of SEO! Good content, well built sites, inbound and outbound links. Why is this such an internet secret? I think it's because it's a lot of work. And sneaky people make lots of money promising results without hard work.
"The [client's] challenge, when setting up a new website or embarking on a major redo of an existing website, is deciding what its purpose will be. A [client] who counts on a web designer to design a [client's] business website is a fool. What do web designers know about the [client's] business? It would be like a home building company hiring an interior decorator to build their model home. A professional designer might have some useful suggestions when it comes to tweaking the aesthetics or the usability, but the business structure and content of the website has to come from the [client]." *
My thoughts exactly, and much more well written than I could have attempted.
"Another problem I've seen [clients] run into is building a website based on their ideal business goals, rather than tying it in to the reality of their current business. Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to create a new website that looks like an ideal business model than to create a website that will actually generate business and profits. The aesthetics and the mission statements are the easy part. Attracting customers to buy [products and services] and the media attention that translates into free public relations is the hard part. Most [clients] rely on the opinions of their friends and of the very people they are paying to design the website." *
* Rosenthal writes for a book publishing audience and I've edited his
industry references to reflect my client base - many from diverse
industries.
Distractions abound. As a website designer, my efforts can only build on top of my client's Herculean feats. I cannot replace them in their critical business role any more than I can read their minds to discern their website visitor's needs. I do make the website construction process simple and affordable as a custom fit for each client.
Build a website with me. It is hard work - but it sure pays off in the end!
