Customized Software Development

Before you can answer this question, there are a few other questions you should answer first. What is the purpose of your website? Is it a personal site or a business site? What do you want to accomplish by having this website? Do you care if people can find you via the various search engines?

There are so many tools available today for building websites that everyone thinks they're an expert. You don't even have to buy the fancy tools. You probably have a program on your computer right now that will create a web page for you. You can even have Microsoft Word create your web pages for you! So you might as well do it yourself, right? If it's a personal site that you are just putting up so you can share pictures with friends and relatives, sure, go ahead and do it yourself. If it's a business site, you need to put more thought into who should do it.

Would you have the 12-year-old kid next door write your ads for the newspaper or write business letters for you? How about creating your billboard? At this point hopefully you're saying that of course you wouldn't let the kid next door do those things for you. But for some reason people look at their website in a different way. Do they think that it isn't REAL advertising? Do they put any thought into the fact that people from ANYWHERE could potentially see it? Obviously, there are a lot of business owners that don't take these things into consideration when they put up a website. If they did, they would put a lot more thought into how they want to present themselves to the world.

The person you have build your website needs to understand business and marketing in general and your business in particular. Now you are probably saying that the best person to build your website might be you. To a certain extent I believe that's correct. I think that the business owner needs to play a very big role in the design of the site. You have to continually remember that your web site might be the first and only glimpse a potential customer has of your business. Only you know what you want to convey to that person. I also think that the business owner should help with a lot of the content that appears on the site. Again, you know what message you want to send and in what tone you want that message to come across. Although you know more about your business than anyone else, you still may not be the person who should build your site. There are additional factors that you need to consider.

Like I said earlier, there are a lot of tools available to build web pages and you probably have something on your computer that will do it for you without you knowing anything about HTML. But there is much more to think about than just getting the pages created. A lot of people start building pages and find all kinds of “cutesy” things that they can do like adding graphics when they serve no purpose or even worse, adding animated graphics. We've all done it, but that doesn't make it right. People using the Internet have become much more sophisticated in the last few years. We all used to think that flashing graphics and animations were cool. Now, most of us use the Internet as a tool. We're looking for information. We know that we don't have to wait for a slow loading page because we can move on to another site that can potentially give us the same information without aggravating us in the process. I want to mention something else about these “tools” you can use to build pages with. Some of them are very good, but a lot of them put in so much unnecessary code that even without you going crazy with graphics, your pages will still take a long time to load.

So how do you pick someone to build your site? First off, find someone who has experience in building sites. I don't just mean any old sites. Make sure that they have built sites for businesses, that the sites come across as professional, they're easy to navigate and that the sites get traffic to them. Don't be afraid to ask them to see the sites and the statistics from their previous work. You can have the most professionally designed site there is, but if it doesn't get any traffic it isn't going to help you. Which brings us to the next point. Make sure that the person who is building your site knows about search engine optimization (SEO). If the person that is building the site for you is not asking you about what types of words or phrases people might use when searching for your site, drop them quickly! They might not come right out and ask it that way, but they better be asking a lot of questions about what your business does, who your current clientele are and who you are trying to reach with your web presence. Another reason to drop the person who you may be considering is if they tell you that they can guarantee you a number one ranking in the top search engines. Unless you are talking to some of the top people in the SEO business who may actually give you that guarantee, most likely the person you are talking to has no clue. If instead they tell you what words and phrases they will be optimizing for and that they feel they can get you some good rankings, I would be more inclined to stick with that person. The web is NOT a static being. There are more pages put out there every day. Every current page and every future page is a potential competitor for the number one spot on any search. Besides that, the search engines change their algorithms that determine which site will come up number one. Your site may need to be constantly fine tuned to continue to compete for that top ranking.

Are you starting to think about your web presence in a different way than you did a few minutes ago? I hope so. Like any other form of advertising, you want to get the best exposure possible and on the Internet this means not just getting the traffic to your site, but getting targeted traffic to your site. Once you get them there you want to provide them with quality content and make the right impression. So make sure that when you choose the person to build your site that they follow good web design principles, they understand enough about your business to help drive quality traffic your direction and they know how to optimize your site for search engines.