This is the first article in series on How to set up an online Business. The articles will cover from whether to write the site yourself, or pay a web design company through to optimising the site and selling products.
Before you start
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've seen a lot of companies rush
to get "a web presence" without thinking about
what they want the site to achieve, why anyone
would want to visit their site over the
competition, and how to increase sales (surely the
whole point of the exercise even if indirectly).
In addition the entire budget goes into
the initial writing of the site. It would be better if most capital
was put aside for promotion and ongoing
maintenance (this includes staff time responding
to emails as well as updating the sites contents).
"Most capital should be
put aside for promotion and maintainence"
Please bear in mind this requires a lot of effort; don’t let anyone or any software package fool you otherwise. Before I studied web design, web programming and website promotion I was a mainframe analyst / programmer.
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Of course you can achieve the same results as a professional over time. The best question to ask is whether the financial saving of not paying a design company is worth your hourly rate to set it up yourself.
Whichever option you choose, the project should be treated as a business within a business, with resources assigned to run the site, budgets etc. Annual hosting and domain name fees will have to be paid even if no further effort is expended after its launch.
Overall I recommend using a local web designer. The reason is that not only will the final product look better, (which lets face it is ALL your prospective customer has to go on before they start reading your sales copy), but you then only focus on how the site will benefit your business.
For my money, web site owners should be spending most of their time looking into ways of promoting the site and dealing with customers. Actual web site maintenance should be delegated.
