Fundamentals – Website budgeting

Face it, -with an unlimited timeline, and an unlimited budget, you still won’t have a perfect website. However, it generally follows that a larger budget will buy you a more successful product. It will be difficult for you to determine a reasonable budget for a website if you have never tried before.

If you are fortunate enough to have a budget already established for you, or know how to establish one, you can set about determining how to derive value from the given amount. If you are trying to determine a budget, start with a number you will be unwilling to spend, and work down from there. Always stay conscious of return on investment. When you have an idea where your ceiling is, you can start to think about the scope of the project, and your budget will begin to crystallize.

The budget is the most important deciding factor in the development of your website.

There are many rules of thumb in the development of a website budget. All of them are wrong. Your business is uniquely its’ own. No rule of thumb can apply directly to your unique situation. Do yourself a favor and make a decision based upon what makes sense to you. Don’t rely on formulas; rely on common sense.

On value
If you could build a website that earned $1000 a month, would you pay $12,000 for it? Of course you would, -the return on investment would guarantee that you earned your investment back in a year. What if it took three years to earn your money back? Would you still build it? Your budget is not an expense, it is an investment with an estimated plan for return.

Not every website will generate revenue. A website can be a branding tool, or a customer service tool. In one way or another its value can be quantified, or else it would be pointless to build it. If you have an effective customer service portal, how many phone service positions become unnecessary? If you build equity into your brand name, what is that worth?

Where does funding come from?
How do you categorize website construction? It really depends on the business. In most cases a website needs a budget all its’ own. A website is a blend of marketing, customer service, and sales. The mix will vary depending on the business plan. If your website has an ecommerce component, you should think of it almost like building a new store front or location.

How much is enough?
Suffice it to say that websites will cost you thousands of dollars or more. There are a wide variety of developers and vendors around today and their pricing varies considerably. At one point there was a number floating around that said a website would cost $10,000 per page to develop. While in some cases this number is realistic, in small business terms today, this is probably excessive. There are a number of award winning websites you can find online today that were developed in their entirety for less than 10k.

It’s best for you if you concentrate on picking a number that you can live with, and set about finding how much value you can derive from that amount.

A budget is a restriction that is created by your businesses situation; you should learn to embrace it. You will be surprised at how much you can achieve with the right team, -even on a small budget.

On budget secrecy
Remember that when you’re interviewing potential developers, you are looking for a business partner. The more information you can share in the beginning, the better the both of you will be able to determine if you are a good fit for each other. You need neither to be ashamed or afraid of the size of your budget.

Challenge your developer with a budget. Once the tables are turned, the burden is on them to perform creatively within that limit.

Things to say to a developer

• I have $xxxx. Show me something you have done for this price.
• If I challenged you to create a website for this much, what would you do?
• What does your average client spend with you in a year? per project?

Design influences – Japan.

Some of the most interesting, and exciting design influences come from other cultures. They’re just for lack of a better word: foreign. It’s intriguing to see typography that’s illegible, but tells a story just the same. Other cultures don’t have the same biases, or visual fears that Americans share. Their design aesthetics are often more colorful, and random than anything we could imagine.

Japanese culture, and design is especially intriguing. It’s bold, colorful, playful, and exotic. They use funny cute characters as spokespersons. Japanese product design looks more like a comic book than a sales piece…

When we find bits that are interesting, or influential in a small way. We tend to pack-rat them. Every-so-often we’ll share a few with you. Here’s the first one on Japan. link

Fundamentals – SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one of the most confused issues about websites today. There seems to be a mistaken assumption that search engine optimization can answer all of the questions that marketing usually addresses.

It’s important to realize that inherently, SEO’s purpose is to entice a search engine into ranking a site higher within its’ index based upon certain search terms. The art comes when you try to trick a search engine into ranking you higher than you may deserve.

As in any system, there are loopholes that can be found. Search engines try hard to return legitimate results to their users requests. Even if your company is better than your competitors, -if they spend more effort, time, and money on their website than you, they will nearly always rank higher than you in search engines, -regardless of your SEO efforts.

Search engine ranking boils down to these factors:
* Search term prevalence
* Quality sites linking for relevance to this term
* Web standards compliance
* Longevity and comprehensiveness of site

If you take advantage of a loophole, count on the loophole being closed soon after your website launches. Search engines thrive on their relevance, -they are as anxious to plug the hole as you are to capitalize on it… -Count on their R&D budget far exceeding yours.

Here are a few of the facts:
* SEO can allow you to be more visible to search engines in your chosen phrases.
* SEO can allow you to cheat the system beyond your means, -but only for a short time.

Things to say to a developer
* What is the best Google page rank you have achieved for a site you have built?
* What is the average search engine traffic count for sites built by your company after a year of existence.
* If these questions are irrelevant to your process, in what way will you assist me in SEO, and increasing traffic?

Fundamentals: Cost of Ownership

There are a few features of your website that will be easy to identify as expenses associated with owning your website. Hosting, payment processing, security certificates, etc. These things all require you to pay with cash out of your pocket. However, there are additional expenses that you should consider when developing a website.

Owning a website requires maintenance. You must update content regularly, if you want this website to remain relevant. Likewise, the internet is always growing, and evolving, -eventually your website will stop functioning due to obsolescence. Be prepared to invest in your website incrementally in the coming years.

If possible, reallocate the same budget every year. Over time you will be the recipient of a well oiled comprehensive, machine that is designed to give exactly what your customers need.

An out of date site can speak to your customer as loudly as not having one at all.

Things to say to a developer

• In what ways do you provide support to customers as an ongoing process?
• let’s pretend that I had not updated my site for a few weeks and there was out of date information on the home page of my website, -would I be the first to know?

Fundamentals: Hosting

A good developer will hold your hand through choosing a hosting provider. Many developers will have hosting partners, or even maintain their own hosting servers. It’s always nice to have an all in one provider, but it’s even nicer to partner with a specialist. If your developer is running servers as a sideline business, you may consider choosing a company that is a dedicated hosting provider.

You should strongly consider choosing a hosting provider that is at the top of the food chain. Really large providers often have redundancy, and feature sets that can’t be approached by smaller companies.

Hosting is a world full of acronyms and terminology. You will likely come up against a bullet point list that’s full of unfamiliar terms. It can be very difficult to do effective value comparisons if you don’t know what you’re comparing. If you are not fortunate enough to have an I.T department to help you make these determinations, you may have to go it alone.

Until you find out how much demand your site will experience, avoid getting locked into long term contracts. If things go well, your site will outgrow its’ first home quickly. Start with a hosting package that seems reasonable and that you are convinced will provide you adequate customer service.

Things to say to a developer

• How do you currently handle most of your clients’ hosting?
• Can you help me to transfer my existing site to a new server until my development is complete?
• Will you handle email setups, domain transfers, SSL, and other features of my hosting for me?
• What is your standard billing rate for these things?
• Explain a time when your current hosting solution was inadequate for one of your clients, and you were able to quickly create a new solution.
• Illustrate a time when you were able to create value for a client due to a change in their business, or a change in their traffic. Explain how re-evaluation of hosting created value…