Decisions to Make About Planning Small Business Web Designs

Introduction:
Questions and Answers about web designs

1. Small Budget
2. Aversion to Web Technology
3. Losing Control
4. What Do I Need?
5. Choosing a Design Firm

1. Cutting Costs
2. Business is Always First
3. Having Certainty
4. What to Get & What to Keep
5. Creative Contract

Knowing what we want is the key to everything
There is a lot of guess work going on with small business owners over what they want in a web design. Getting past the guesswork and into the knowing part of web functions and features is where this page will take you. Let's start with the money question first because this is what dictates how much personal involvement you want to take on in the building of your business web site.

Small Budgets
To properly understand about working with a small budget it is best to first look at the full wish list you may have and then work at cutting it back in logical ways. In this way you can create a broad foundation of web capabilities that can lay dormant for if, and when, you need to add them in. For instance, you cannot afford to build a photo gallery right away, but the navigation menu and page layout needs to be designed in such a way as to accommodate this later on.

What is the least that you need?
In most cases a business web site needs to create sales and so it needs to accomodate the 5 steps of the buying cycle. In basic terms this means about 3 to 6 pages including the HOME page. Within the structure of the web design it needs to support future page additions and allow for inexpensive updates. It should also economically support future re-designs without mangling the content.

If you are asking a web designer to build 4 pages with the considerations above, and for which you will provide the text content and the images, or specify precisely what images you want, and where you want them... then you could budget for about $150 per page. You will certainly find cheaper web design resources that will give you a template design for less and you may not know that the design is not original or flexible for accomodating later additions.

When you need the web design firm to also write the marketing material for the buying cycle then you will need a larger budget. Depending on how much creative writing is involved you could be doubling or tripling the cost of those 4 pages.

Having the search engine optimization added in to put you in the top 10 for your search terms could cost a fee per page or a flat fee to include all pages. Budget a minimum of $100 to $250 for each page (search term).

Are there better deals to be had?
That depends on what you might call a deal. There are certainly cheaper ways of getting a web site on-line but you do need to ask yourself why you would even bother with a cheap design? Even the prettiest of designs will not bring in business without quality content and search engines listing your site in the top 10, so going cheap on the design is simply cutting the cost of the least expensive aspect of a web site. In every industry there are ways to cut corners and a cheap web design uses all of the short cuts. You won't know this until you want to improve the site's performance, but if you have no intention of trying to gain market share then it could make sense to buy the cheapest off the shelf solution.

Small Budget Solutions
There is a lot of work that you can do yourself, or someone in your company can do it for you, that will cut your costs. The advantages are many and the costs are controllable when done in-house.

You can write the page content and have it all ready for the designer to paste into the page. You can focus on your market and write content to assist your visitors through the buying cycle. This is preferred, but it is not what usually happens with your competitiors as they most often choose to write about their company and about the things they think their market should know. There are so many small business web sites doing just that so you won't be making any disasterous mistakes following the common path. Even so, you will not be doing any better than the rest. The point here is that you will save yourself a lot of money by putting the content together yourself, but you won't benefit much unless the content performs to high standards by giving your market the information it so desperately wants.

At any rate, a web designer will ask you to provide the written content and tell you that any editing later will be an added cost. Even though the designer makes it clear that the content is your responsibility they anticipate having some involvement cleaning it up, making it fit, and they set their costs accordingly. If you surprised them and gave them a package of neat, proofed and formatted pages they would love you for it. That love is worth a few bucks in your pocket.

Aversion to Web Technology
We all feel an aversion to technology in some way regardless of what we know and how smart we are. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because you are running a business, not a web design. The business web design needs to follow good business practices, not state of the art web technology.

When you are talking with web designers and they speak the geek then it's time for you to ask them what they are talking about. Would you stay in a business meeting where other people talked in a language foreign to you? Not likely. It is rude and unproductive and you have better things to do with your time.

If you do not understand the language it is not your fault. The web design firm needs to send in an interpreter if they expect to do business with you. If you spoke to your market way over the top of their head do you think they would hang around more than 10 seconds? Not on your web site they won't.

Business is Always First
Whenever you bump into the techno babble you can turn it into a business inquirey instead. When you do this it will surprise you how little business knowledge the technology industry really has.

How do you make techno-talk behave?
First you must know, with certainty, that any term you don't understand has to be able to make sense as a business concept or else it is just worthless babble. You do not need to understand what the technology means other than how it works in business terms for your web site. For instance, a web designer tells you that a dynamic web design using PHP and MySql can come with a content management system. You don't know what that means and there's little reason to ask, even if you wanted to. All you want to know is the business end and so you say, "How is that going to increase my sales, or make doing business easier?"

Questions to ask of any technology offering
It does not matter what techno-babble comes your way it must answer one or more of the following questions or it is just a snazzy bit of lingo.

• How will that help me communicate to my market?
• How does it support my visitor's need to solve their problem?
• Will it slow down page loading and therefore represent poor service?
• How will my visitors benefit from this? (could be intangible benefits)
• What will it cost me, and is there a cheaper alternative?
• Give me a successful measurable example?

From the answers you receive you will know if the technology has any value. You can also tell by any hesitation or after thoughts that go into answering the question as to how well thought out the idea was in the first place. You do not need a corkscrew if your bottle doesn't have a cork.

Losing Control
The more overwhelmed we are with web design structure, content, search engines, pay-per-click, adwords etc., etc., the more we feel like we're losing control. The moment we think we are not up to the task the more we feel that we have to give way to the experts. There is so much that we don't know about web design functions and the various features available and yet, as business owners, we are asked to make a decision on what we want to include as part of the web site.

At this point, when it all seems to be too much to deal with we often say something like, "Well, what do you think should be done?" This puts the decision in the hands of the professional web designer. Sometimes it works on our behalf and sometimes it doesn't. For a small business web site that has no need for a shopping cart then there are a lot of other things that it won't need either. What you need is certainty, and in a very real way you already have that certainty.

Having Certainty
The moment you leave the business arena is the moment you lose certainty… so don't leave. Insist that every presentation, every discussion and every new feature and function being offered must be presented in practical business terms, such as how it enhances your bottom line in measurable ways. You have the 6 questions above that deal with the foreign language called technology, and in this new situation the concepts being offered sound useful, but do they make business sense? Do you need a javascript menu for 6 pages? Even if it doesn't cost any more money does it improve the site's navigation?

Now we need a new list of questions to ask
If it feels like you are losing control then have these few questions in your hip pocket and fire them out when the designing discussion gets too creative.

• How does this improve or support search engine optimization (SEO) work I may want done?
• What benefits will my site visitors experience?
• Does this simplify the site's design or function?
• How does it improve communication with my market?
• How does this reduce my costs?

If there isn't a positive answer then why go there. Why bother trying to understand any web features or functions if they do not enhance your business. The business web site has a primary purpose and that is to support your business. Anything that doesn't enhance business is extra frills. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a few frills if you want, but you need to know that they're frills you are paying for.

What do you need?
This can only be answered by yourself. Web designers will give you all kinds of advice. Some of it good, most of it is not so good. Therefore, the first thing you need is to know is your options and to have them explained. Ideally, if your didn't know what was important in a web design you would hire a consultant. For a $100 consulting fee you would have enough information to make smart choices and save many hundreds of dollars on worthless things.

Why do You need a web site?

1. You need a site for marketing your business and products
2. You need a web site to increase your market share
3. You simply want an on-line presence

Getting what you want
If money is not a concideration then your problem is solved… have whatever you want. That would be nice but not necesarily productive or even useful. Getting what you want is mostly a matter of knowing what you want, and this is not always an easy thing to determine. What do you want your web site to do? This is where it all begins and so the questions need to be pointed in this direction.

Do you want your web site to increase sales? Yes, probably.
Do you want exposure (search engines)?
Do you want compliments on the design?
Do you want to build a network?

And the list goes on and on. When you know the primary two or three things your web site must do then you have a clear focus on what to achieve. For most small businesses this would amount to something like the following list.

1. Getting in the top 10 with Google for your search terms
2. Generating business from the exposure
3. Minimum maintenance and expense for updates

And for your information, this is very doable. A web site that is simple, clean, to the point and helps visitors make decisions is the least expensive in terms of the design costs. It requires a larger but one time expense for both the professional sales copy and the search engine optimization. When it's done right you may pay upward to $3000 for a 6 page web site that gives you what you want - and then it pays for itself. But it doesn't end there because in 3 to 5 years from now you will want a new "face" to the web site and a quality web design gives you the flexibility to do that without touching the SEO or sales copy.

• Large firm
  A large firm has more resources and bigger clients. Their work flow may not accommodate the small business owner who doesn't have top priority. These firms are well suited to larger businesses.
• Small Web Design Firm
  They could be personable as well as being skilled, which may be a fit for you. You will feel closer to the web design process. Often the one you talk to is directly involved with the design.
• Owner Operator or freelance
  Work from home which means the lowest overhead. These people are in a niche market and are not anxious to take on just any kind of work. There are things they specialize in and there are things they don't do, but for small business web design it is probably a good fit. Affordable with quality work is what they offer, as a rule. Many freelance designers want to appear to be working from a storefront. It's a perception thing that is not very important.
• A friend or a high school student (low cost)
  You know someone that will whip up a web site for you for cheap. If you're lucky the friend or neighbor may be good at what they do, but for most of us it's not a good choice

A Creative Contract
After you have shopped around and finally decided on the right web designer for you it doesn't mean that they will always be the best firm for your needs down the road. They just have to be the best for right now and that includes forming a creative contract with you that gives your business a boost. A creative partnership works to the benefit of both parties.

If it is your intent to form a lasting relationship with a really good small business web designer then you would probably have more luck looking at the smaller firms or an owner operator (freelance) working on their own. The larger firms have a different agenda and they specialize and compartmentalize so that they hire good visual designers, and good SEO people, and good database guys and etc. This cuts both ways in that you have good people doing your web site but they probably do not get together and discuss what is best for your web marketing plan.

On the other hand, a skilled jack of all trades in the web industry will do a good job in all areas and keep a nice balance between esthetics and business function. If marketing and writing is another skill then you've got the best of all worlds. There is probably better designers, better marketers and better writers, but being good in all three is much better than three excellent individuals. The reason for this is the understanding that the whole is greater then the sum of the parts. You get more when the wisdom is all in one body. You just need to find that somebody.

So ask. Talk to web designers and see if they do it all, and then look at the work. Does it sell to you? Does it catch your eye? Does it function cleanly? You will know when you see it. Keep looking until you do, or until you run out of time.