Below is a great article by Jennifer Saylor on how to avoid throwing money away on a website, and best practices for building a website that will pull it’s weight and bring in a return on your investment. In her words: “ Doing it right is a money saver, a revenue generator, and a wise investment, not a luxury.” Well said.
Appearance vs. performance: Two steps to building a website that works
By Jennifer Saylor
If you’re building a lead-generating website (a site you hope will attract people searching for a product or service, especially among competitors) or a site driven by traffic or advertising, here’s a great way to fail:
Invest in appearance: Use the nearest web designer and gut instinct to create an underperforming site (and if it’s got a custom back end, a completely borked back end created by an uneducated, lowest-cost provider who builds bad code, poor performance and major mistakes into your site and your customer experience.)
Here’s how to win:
Invest in performance: Use a team of professionals working together, and carefully invest your money in a high-performing, easy-to-use, reliable site with a strong return on your investment (leads, signups, high traffic).
You don’t have the cash on hand. This kind of basic business need is exactly what loans and investors are for. If loans and investors aren’t an option, work your business plan until you’re ready for an upgrade, and then rebuild your website the right way.
Stop treating your website like the only thing in your life that it’s OK to hire the cheapest worker for. Here’s how NOT to create a great-looking, structurally unsound website that holds your business back.
Step 1: The Business Plan
If you’ve got a great idea, the next step isn’t a website. The next step is a business plan: A well-researched, comprehensive business plan detailing competitors and a target market you want to reach with a comprehensive marketing plan.
Do the work. THEN you’re ready for a website.
Step 2: The Website Team
A successful (read: profitable) lead-generating website that relies on searches is not created by one person with an idea and the nearest web designer. A good website is created by a team of professionals working together in service to clearly defined goals of a marketing plan. Here’s the team:
Web designer: Someone who can create a mobile-friendly site with social media integration, and work with the web marketer and the business plan to lay out the path of conversion (how a visitor travels from finding your website to taking a next step towards the goal you want, like signing up for a free consultation). The lowest-cost provider, as with any purchase, is usually the one to avoid.
As with all important major purchases, research offers, get quotes, and know what you’re getting into (check out a portfolio and testimonials).
Graphic designer: Not just for website graphics, but to create the whole visual family: logo series and related images (Twitter background, Facebook graphics) for the site and all social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flicker, etc.
Web developer: If your site has a back end, seek a developer with a good reputation for well-written code. Bad code is as costly as cheap construction to a homeowner. Again, the low cost provider will probably give you what you pay for: costly, damaging errors in the fundamental structure of your site.
Social media consultant: This person isn’t an intern or social media fan, but an experienced professional educated in your needs and vision, who uses the business plan to recommend how to target your market with social media tools including Facebook’s Open Graph integration, and widgets and plugins for appropriate profiles.
Web copywriter: Working with the web marketer, this person optimizes for search engines and creates meaningful content that stirs your reader.
Web marketer: One of the most important members of the team, and commonly left on the sidelines to bemoan your fate without his/her help. The web marketer helps the web designer, social media consultant and graphic designer work TOGETHER to create a site that shares a clear and inviting message, attracts the Google searches you want, converts traffic, optimizes signups and lead generation, and otherwise INCREASES SALES, CONVERSIONS AND REVENUE. (Later, you’ll want this person to set up Google Ads as well…)
You may wish to involve a project manager, to keep everyone on target with your site’s unique goals. The goal here, project manager or not, is clear COMMUNICATION and COLLABORATION in service to the clearly defined goals of market research and a business plan. (The scenario to avoid is experts working in isolation on their piece of the puzzle, not sharing ideas, creativity or group understanding of the goals of the site.) This group must have understanding of each piece of the mission and share a vision of the whole. The group must work, to the greatest extent possible, as a team.
(At the same time, and working with the same vision and the same crew, you’ll also need to create a BRAND: a family of online media profiles and visual elements [logos, icons, business cards] that use the same colors, images and words to tell the story of what your company is and what it will do for its customers.)
Just like the real estate you call home, your digital home needs to be well-designed (graphic designer, web designer), inviting (web marketer, social media consultant, web copywriter) and structurally sound (web designer, web developer). Don’t throw your money away with a discount-design, poor-performance digital money pit that crashes and doesn’t attract visitors.
Design your site this way. It’s hard and it’s expensive, but for a site you rely on for your living, it’s worth it. Doing it right is a money saver, a revenue generator, and a wise investment, not a luxury.
Jennifer Saylor is a social media/ online marketing consultant with Social Headroom (SocialHeadroom.com) in Asheville, NC. She’s seen the above worst-case scenario above played out about three times, and doesn’t want it to happen to you or anyone else. Friends don’t let friends build worthless websites.
