How Do I Manage My Website?

Q: Should I build and maintain my business's website myself or pay someone else to do the work for me?

There are two basic factors to consider when answering this question.  Number one: Is building and maintaining websites the key focus of your business? Number two: Could your time be better spent doing important tasks that will make your business more profitable and efficient? If your answers were "no" and "yes" respectively, then you should leave the building and maintaining of your website to a professional.

Remember this: Every minute you spend on tasks that are not related to the key focus of your business is time spent to the detriment of your business. In other words, every minute you spend focusing on tasks that do not contribute to the growth of your business and thereby increase your bottom line is time wasted.

If you want to be a web designer, be a web designer. However, if the key focus of your business is building widgets, it would be more profitable and beneficial (not to mention wise) to spend your time building widgets, not websites.

Case in point: I once had a very wealthy dentist ask if I could teach him how to maintain his website so he wouldn't have to pay me to do it. Now my teeth had helped put this guy's kids through college, but that didn't seem to matter. At that moment he was more concerned about having to pay for changes to his website than my personal oral hygiene. "Sure," I said, "I'll be glad to teach you how to update your website, just as soon as you teach me how to clean my own teeth so I don't have to pay you to do it." He got the point. And he charged me enough for the cleaning to keep his site updated for months. Smart man!

Many business owners think they can't afford a professionally designed website, and that simply is not true. While the old adage "You get what you pay for" is never truer than when applied to website design, having a professional web designer do the work for you is money well spent. A well-designed website can bring you a many-fold return on your investment. You can't say that about too many other types of collateral.

While it is best to leave website design and maintenance to the experts, it is your responsibility to provide the designer with the content (text and photographs) that best convey your company's message to your customers. A website, no matter how well-designed, is meaningless if it lacks the content required to interest customers in the products you sell or the services you provide.

Below are a few questions that, once answered, will help ensure that your website's message is as appealing as its design. Go over these points with the designer before the design process begins, as the answers will help determine the direction your website's design should take.

What is the purpose of your website? Most business websites have two purposes: (1) to educate the consumer and (2) to sell their products or services. If you sell shoes, for example, the purpose of your website is to educate potential customers on the quality and durability of your shoes and, as a result, to sell your shoes. If you paint houses, the purpose of your website is to educate homeowners on why your services are superior to other painters and sell them on hiring you to paint their house. By defining the purpose of your website, you will give the designer the information required to create a website that best conveys that purpose to your target audience.

Who is my target audience? Your target audience consists of those folks you want to attract to your website: potential and current customers, future and current employees, possible investors and so on. Anyone who might be interested in your company and its products or services is a member of your target audience. Correctly identifying your target audience is vital, since your website should be designed specifically to appeal to your target audience.

Put yourself in their shoes (or in front of their computers). Imagine your website through their eyes. If you were visiting a website such as yours, what would you expect to find and what would you be disappointed not to find? Identify your target audience, then have your website designed to fulfill their needs and surpass their expectations.

What content should my website feature? Your website content should be driven by the nature of your business. If you're a real estate agent, your site should feature photographs of homes you have for sale and information on buying and selling a home. If you own an auto body shop, your site might feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. Remember to determine the purpose of your site, and then develop the content to serve that purpose.

What's my competition doing? The last question you should ask is one of the most important: What is your competition doing on the web? Do a Google search for similar businesses and click around their websites. How are their websites designed? What message are they trying to convey? Are they doing a good job of conveying that message and, as a result, selling products? What do you like about their websites? What don't you like? Make note of the things you like and the things you dislike, and then share your findings with your site designer.

Remember, you're not stealing trade secrets here. You're just borrowing ideas!

“I'm a business owner who would like to manage my own website. Can you teach me?”

This is a request that we get at least a couple of times per week. It's nothing unusual for site owners to be unhappy when it comes to depending on a web developer to make the changes and updates they need. It makes perfect sense. These days, websites have evolved to be much more than an online business card. They are now rich publishing platforms which require continuous updating to feed current information to hungry customers. Because of this, it has become very unwieldy to keep relying on an external company for content updates and simple changes.

Luckily, technology has been quickly evolving to make things easier, less expensive, and at the same time offer a greater level of control than ever before.

Still, there is some good and bad news for those seeking to do-it-yourself. The "good" news is that content management systems like Joomla and Wordpress can make managing your content readily possible for those lacking technical skills. The "bad" news (only bad depending on your point of view) is that even with these systems, you're really not going to get much farther than basic content management without a professional background. Unless you're not concerned with the site maintaining a professional appearance across all browsers, the ability to change the layout and most graphical elements is something that requires a professional.

We offer two solutions for business owners who want to manage their site. The first is to build a new site based on a content management system (CMS) and then train you to use it (which is not difficult). The second is to train you to use your existing CMS if you already own one.

We do not offer training beyond basic content management to those who aren't interested in investing the necessary time to take regular lessons for a period of time. Changing the graphics/layout/theme of your website is a skill that requires extensive training (and practice) to properly do. There's a lot more to it then you may think, and it's not something you want to cut corners on if you care about presenting yourself and your business in a professional image.

So in a nutshell, unless you are someone who plans on web development as a career, we would not recommend trying to go beyond basic content management. But on a trip back to the good news, the options you'll have for even "simple" content management are getting better all the time. There are many great photo galleries (with automatic resizing and thumbnail creation), shopping carts, events calendars, newsletters, forums, etc. available as extensions that can be set up to allow you a lot of control.

If set up properly, a CMS can put quite a bit of power in your hands... while lowering your web maintenance costs. But you'll probably not want to throw away that trusty web developer quite yet. ;)