The Diablog - it’s Diabloglical™

How much does a website cost? The question continues to be asked.

13 May 2010

I have a feeling this topic will continue to come up here because we hear it so often. I’ll call this the latest edition in a series.

Buying a website is like buying a car. Hold your dead horses, ‘cause I’m really gonna beat this one.

What kind of car do you drive? Big or small? Flashy or conservative? Luxurious or practical? These are the same questions that we ask our customers in Discovery. Are you planning for a compact brochure site, or do you need to haul a ton of content? Are your customers impressed by your style, or do you just need something to convey your message in the simplest way possible?

The analogy is even stronger if you think about buying a car for your company. I have a friend who is a regional sales rep. His company buys him and five other reps a new car every two or three years. They buy practical, comfortable cars with enough room to carry some luggage and product samples. The cars probably average around $25k each. So every three years, this company spends $150k on “a car”. To build a website that does what these field reps do, they would need to catalog hundreds of products with numerous additional options, integrate the website’s database to several manufacturer/supplier accounting and CRM systems, integrate with dozens of distributor offices (who do not all run the same accounting software), integrate with their own internal CRM and fulfillment solutions, provide unique access privileges for all of their distributors to allow for pricing variances, and assure everyone of tight security. So what would their website cost? It might cost about the same as the cars.

What if you run a landscaping company? You don’t really need a company car; you need a truck. It needs to be big enough to carry a lot of plants, and it needs an extended cab to carry a crew to job sites. You want to buy a new truck for reliability - you don’t want to miss appointments with your customers because your truck breaks down. Branding is also important, so it’s worth spending more to get your logo and marketing message professionally applied to all visible surfaces of the truck. The website equivalent is a data-driven site (to haul a lot of plants and a crew), hosted with a professional hosting service (to provide prompt, consistent service to your customers), that is designed by a talented and experienced interactive agency (the web version of fleet graphics). Again, the truck and the website could cost about the same.

Even the simple, brochure-style website can vary in cost based on what is important to the site owner. An agent for professional athletes may drive a Lamborghini because they want prospects and clients to have unwavering confidence that they are there to make money. An architect may drive a hybrid to reinforce their commitment to green design. Both of these people could do their actual work while driving a Hyundai, but they both spend more on their car as an investment in their business. A small brochure website can cost very little, but if spending more on highly refined design and effects translates into more revenue, it is a good investment, even if it’s tens of thousands of dollars.

Most business owners can conduct the analysis needed to buy an appropriate vehicle for their company. The process of budgeting for a website is only complicated if no one within the company understands how websites are built. An experienced internet consultant makes the task as easy as car shopping.

We know the business side of the internet. Let us share our extensive web business experience to help you grow your business.

Stories from the web development trenches.

12 May 2010

We thought it would be fun to share some of the notable successes and failures we have seen over the course of building websites. No names, just examples. We plan to do this periodically in this blog. Please share your war stories with us - we'll anonymously publish the juicy ones (with your permission).

Experience can make or break a project. It can certainly make or break a budget. We worked on a project where the site owner was the micro-managing type. They had a limited budget and a short timeline. They insisted that they could manage the project and choose the team to create their website, without our assistance. Here’s the team they assembled: the producer was an employee of the site owner who had never produced a website before, the designer had design experience, but not in website design, the front-end coder was a relative of an employee of the site owner, and no one was assigned responsibility for the video that was supposed to tell the whole marketing story of the company.

What was the result? The deadline was missed by close to a year, and the total cost of the project was far higher than it needed to be.

We received the design (to start implementation) six months after the proposed go-live date, and our billables on the project were several times more than our billables to other, more experienced customers for projects of similar size. The fact that our costs went up so dramatically is the most significant lesson to be learned. We sat in meeting after meeting reviewing the same information over and over. We spent dozens of hours in phone calls and writing emails explaining to everyone on the team their job responsibilities.

Here’s an example of the opposite scenario. We recently had the pleasure of working with an entire team of experienced professionals on a fairly substantial project.

The site owner recognized that their project was fairly complex, so they hired a very experienced agency. One meeting we attended included a producer, a user-interface designer, a graphic designer, a copywriter, a frontend coder, backend coders, and an account manager. In one brief meeting, the entire implementation team had all the information they needed to do their jobs. Nothing technical had to be explained to anyone; everyone already knew how to do their job.

The results of this project were very different from the first story. The entire project (Discovery through Implementation) took less time than the first team needed just to get an approved design, even though the first example was a brochure site with just a handful of pages and the second example was a highly complex presentation of hundreds of pages that were tagged for filtering and included complex architecture where content appeared in varying ways on multiple pages.

Experience has value. An experienced professional really can be the better value, even if their hourly rate is higher than that of a green rookie. Not only can the seasoned pro do the same amount of work in much less time (a higher hourly rate does not always mean a higher total cost), and the final product will likely be better. The worst choice is often assigning a task to an employee with no experience. The flawed logic is: since an employee is already on the payroll, they aren’t really costing anything. Of course they cost something. They draw a paycheck. They will be pulled off of other tasks to try to learn their new assignment, reducing productivity in other areas. Worst of all, they may not ever be able to complete the task they have been assigned, leaving the rest of the team sitting on their hands.

Dialogs Professional Services provides expertise to web projects. Our expertise is not limited to Dialogs development - we are also experienced at translating business processes to web practices, making online business more profitable.

Don’t make your web designer work in a vacuum. (part 2 of 2)

30 April 2010

As I mentioned yesterday, the success of a web design can be limited by a lack of understanding about technology. The design affects what everyone else on the interactive team can do. A good design is more than pretty pictures. It is ALSO a user interface that can free developers to add powerful functionality that directly impacts the site owner’s profitability. That “also” is important. A good website design is both aesthetic and functional.

The point is: the designer shouldn’t be expected to know everything. The designer’s strength comes from working through a list of necessities and coming up with an engaging presentation. The designer is not the right person to write that list of business and marketing priorities.

I’m going to share some real-life experiences where the designer was left to make their own decisions about website functionality and usability. It’s not important to know the project details to understand what went wrong. These examples are all SEO issues I have seen, but I could also have listed examples where the designer was left in the dark about information architecture or URL structure and deep linking or dynamically repurposed content or site personalization or browser-specific usability limitations.

• Headline Usage: I have seen designs where a page layout has no headlines. I have seen multiple headlines. Google wants to see one “h1” tagged headline. If the content seems to need two, split the content into two pages. That’s OK - Google likes more pages. I have heard numerous designers ask the same thing: “Does it matter how many headlines there are on a page?” Yes, it matters, but what really matters is the designer asked the question. When the developer is handed a design and is told to shut up and implement, the resulting site will be weaker than if they are allowed input.
• The Flash Intro (circa 1997): The idea behind a Flash intro is to play an animated commercial that precedes all other web content. The idea was a good one back when site visitors had slow connection speeds and limited browsing capabilities. It made a cool first impression for a site that had very little coolness anywhere else. It also worked because search engines were prioritizing content differently in the early days of internet popularity than they do today. The Flash intro isn’t dead yet. I still see them on occasion. We vaccinate against them - like swine flu - whenever we are given the chance. Google wants the purpose of a site to be clearly written up on the home page, and the first page that comes up on a website is what Google says is home, even if you prefer to call it an intro that precedes the “real” home page.
• Frequently Updated Content: Designers ask me (with surprising frequency) why a content management systems is needed at all. The question itself is telling; hearing the question frequently is surprising. Google equates relevancy to change. Website copy needs to be different every time Google comes back to re-index a website’s content - commonly every 3-7 days. Seriously, for a website to be successful, some part of the copy needs to be re-written once or twice every week. The website designer who recommends a hard-coded HTML site or a Flash-only site is heading toward failure. Someone non-technical will likely be responsible for keeping Google happy by frequently tweaking the copy. They may be a professional copywriter or marketer, or they may be a staffer with the site owner. It’s unlikely that they will be a skilled Flash or Dreamweaver user.
• Google Skepticism: I commonly have to defend Google to designers (and site owners and developers, by the way). “Why should Google have authority over what we do?” It’s simply the way it is. Google IS the authority. People use Google to find stuff on the web. Google studies human behavior. Google writes its prioritization algorithm to emulate real human behavior. Whenever I say that Google likes something, it also means that real human web surfers like that same something. Don’t fight it. If you can make Google happy, you are also making site visitors happy, and that’s what’s really important.

In all of these examples, failure would have been inevitable if the designer had continued to work in a vacuum, without the input of other experts.

The designer isn’t at fault. Neither is the customer or the developer or the marketer. Without a collaborative process, each person can do their job to the best of their ability, and the resulting product will be ineffective. By working together to fix these issues, no one fails.

Dialogs Professional Services provides the expertise creatives need to work the web. We can help you create websites that give your clients a competitive edge in business without getting in the way of your creative work. Let's talk.