Some people seem to be under various misunderstandings regarding online business. A lot of these things have been said time and time again. Many of them are like bad pennies to anyone that works in the web industry – you get a huge here we go feeling every time one of these comes up. I would like to look at a few that recently again came up in my own experiences:
- You will not get people just to come to your site without promoting it.
- No person or company should ever guarantee you will be first on google or any search engine for that matter.
- You can’t just put a good design, meta tags and solid development core and expect search engines to just find them and put them in the top pages.
- Understand your competition and market for your site, this effects how it will be used.
- A good website takes time, don’t ask for something quickly – the phrase you get what you pay for also comes to mind. This is the reason a lot of designers do not do spec work, good designers tailor the work to the project and as a result often don’t just create without working with the client. If you just want something off the shelf go for a template.
- If it’s not been done before maybe there is a reason for it.
I really think some people are under the misunderstanding that the web is a magical solution to their problems. You still need a good plan, a good business, something for people to come to. You still need ways to get the people through the door, just submitting to search engines doesn’t get your site noticed. Sites also can’t just be left without some maintenance. The internet is a great tool for business but it should never be mistaken as a license to print money – that is so pre-bubble bursting a concept it boggles that some may still think that way.
Just as you can’t just put something online and expect it to work well, you can’t expect your designer to create something that will draw people in without letting people know about the site. Good design, good interface and solid development foundations go towards creating a successful site. It’s a recipe that you have to add all of the ingredients along with this. Mix in design, mix in search engine optimisation, mix in business analysis of if it’s even worth doing, mix in marketing, mix in a solid development core and good hosting.
There has been a lot of thought about sticky websites. This means sites that are successful because you come back to them. These sites don’t just get successful, that success is worked at. Word of mouth, promotion, publicity, getting the word out there – these are all things that have to happen. The web is a big place and just by putting a site online it’s not going to get crowds – it could be the greatest thing since the last greatest thing, but it has to be known about. To ignore all the parts of the recipe just ends up with a meal nobody wants to eat.
“You will not get people just to come to your site without promoting it.”
I completely agree. It seems that some people think they can hire a designer to do a website, put it live, and then the traffic comes in. So wrong. The work does not stop for your website when it goes live.
There was a period last year where I received several emails, all from different people, requesting to (a) somehow exclusively use my website’s design for free in some verbal deal to do so or (b) pay me $50/$100 to design a site for them. I can’t say I was completely astonished by their requests, as I’ve grown used to some of the strange and not-so-Internet-savvy thinking of some, but at the same time…wtf?
You get what you pay for is right. One hundred bucks will and should get you a pretty crappy web design, or at least one that isn’t fully licensed.
Excellent post. Thanks for keeping the focus and attention on the right things…
Far too often, clients assume that good design, meta tags, etc is all it takes to get top page placement w/search engines.
Understanding one’s competition and market should consistently rank as a top priority for sites looking to generate additional site traffic.
Best,
Anjula Duggal
Editor
Notes on Design,
the blog of DesignSessions
http://blog.sessions.edu/
How about the folks who want a fabulous web site but have no content to put on it and think you can just write some stuff for them? I’ve been dealing a lot with this lately. If you don’t have quality content the design isn’t really going to matter (imo).
It’s great to see others feel the same way. In some ways I always hope the myth has been broken then BANG! something crops up to remind me the war has not been won.
The value of sites is something that is always going to be an issue. In part other designers tend to look to others and see what they charge and seem to fall into 2 categories from that.
1. I can undercut that and get the project. This is so often the part that makes people ‘expect’ to not pay the right price.
2. They charge such a high rate I can expect to with weeks worth of experience.
The worst is actually the first one as this has caused a great deal of the ugly side of the web with badly thought out things done on the cheap.
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This is so true, so many people are completely miss leaded and believe that the internet will bring them vast riches without them having to lift a finger. Unfortunately an internet business is just like a brick and mortar business and you have to work hard at it to get it going and to keep it going.