A quick guide for small and micro-businesses.
Hiring a web designer is a pretty daunting process.You don’t really understand the technology, and you want something that looks good.
But there’s only one factor that really counts:
Are you going to be able to maintain the site yourself once the designer is done with it?
I’m not talking about making major changes. But unless your business is one of those that never changes, you’re going to need to make small modification over time.
Don't hire a web designer to build you something like this
Let’s use the metaphor of a house. Unless you’re a contractor, you’re not going to want to get involved in moving walls around. But you sure as heck should be able to do the dishes, sweep the floors, paint the walls, and even hang up a picture or two.
Right?
As someone who works with a lot of very small businesses, I see too many people who’ve sunk thousands of dollars into complicated (and sometimes strikingly beautiful) websites that they simply can’t maintain on their own.
This is wrong.
So by all means find someone who can create a beautiful site for you. But it’s more important to find someone who will build you the site in an easy-to-use framework that you can manage yourself.
I’m a big fan of WordPress. Once everything is set up properly, the site owners don’t have to get involved in the nitty gritty of the code. But they’re free to keep updating the site as they see fit.
As soon as you have a tool that’s easy to use, you’ll use it more. And that translates into a stronger web presence, more traffic, and more committed fans.
Here are two sites you can go look at if you want to see what I mean. The first is the Salmonberry School. The teacher, Paul, didn’t even know how to properly code a hyperlink until this morning, but he’s been competently blogging about school events for several months now.
The other is the Funhouse on Orcas Island. These folks switched from a complicated and hard to maintain site that had been built in an old version of Adobe Pagemill (or something like that). Each update to the site involved emailing changes to someone who did the edits in between his other work. Now it runs on WordPress. The Funhouse staff can make all the changes themselves. (And they don’t even have to come running back to me for refresher courses. It’s that easy to use.)
By the way, both sites are running on the Thesis Theme for WordPress, which I like because it’s easy to customize (for someone who knows code) and even easier to use.
Conclusion:
If you’re looking for a designer, find someone who will build your site in a tool that will be easy for you to maintain, without forcing you to learn HTML.
It’s important to have an attractive site, but not at the expense of what I call “internal usability.”
Questions? Feedback? I’d love to hear it in the comments section.
SEO help from the ScribeSEO plugin. Check it out for yourself.
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I agree totally with this – I’ve seen far too many people spend several thousand dollars on stuff that looks nice, but it actually useless for marketing purposes, and nearly impossible to change.
Wordpress/thesis solves that problem
I had one of my websites done by a pro and he linked it with Contribute so I could update the text whenever I wanted and add extra photos. That’s great but it’s all I can do. I can’t change the order or content of the navigation, the font, colour or anything to do with how the website looks.
With my new website I’ve gone down the WordPress- Thesis route and it’s so much easier. It took me a little time to get the hang of it because I stupidly didn’t think to getting coaching or it set up properly! I wish I had discovered you, Joe, a bit earlier – you would have saved me masses of time!
Agreed. Any process where the way to fix something is “e-mail the changes to so-and-so; and she’ll be happy to make them” is a problem. Even if you don’t usually feel compelled to be in control of everything, giving up direct control of your website content will backfire–usually by you deciding that the small changes aren’t worth it (because the process is so clunky) so your site ends up being just a little bit wrong in all kinds of ways. Not good.
I just wrote a post on my site about this. I had a friend just spend £5000 on a site. I had a stern conversation with her about how she could have got the same thing with wordpress.
I’m glad this strikes a chord. One of the things I struggle against with clients is their feeling that their website should be “one of a kind” and not based on a template or framework. I say if you pick the right framework (which we all seem to agree is Thesis) then you try to be as creative and original as your budget and skills allow. And then you call it good enough and focus on your content.
Adobe Pagemill? Wow.. That was back in the days when people used to code by HAND! in Notepad!
Any good designer should not only create a site that the owner can update, but also give the page owner the tools and information they need to make those changes. So if someone doesn’t know how to create a hyperlink, it’s a good idea to either show them a tutorial of how it’s done, or walk them through it when you put the site up on the server and they’re ready to take over.
Having a site can be a daunting at first, but if you dip a toe or two in, pretty soon you’ll be able to make a big splash
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