How Much Money is Your Website Not Saving You?
Flushed with pride, my long time friend tells me, “I’ve got my website up and it cost me next to nothing! You’ve got to take a look!” He gives me the website address and stands expectantly behind me as I type in the domain name in my browser.
There’s a long lag as we wait for the web page to load and he tells me, “It’s a little bit slow, but it’s worth it. You’ll see.”
As we wait and wait all I can think is that if I were a real visitor I would have left already.
Finally the page loads. Across the top, my friend’s domain name rolls across the screen in a flash animation. It finishes and starts all over again. Behind the text on the page is an image of children playing that fills the entire browser window. It has been lightened to make the text easier to read, but it’s not quite enough so I strain to read what’s on the page. I’m about to click on one of the fancy buttons at the top of the page when a catchy little tune begins playing. I look for a control to turn it down or off but there doesn’t seem to be one.
“Isn’t it unique?” he grins. He reaches for the mouse and clicks on an icon at the side of the page: “Check out the cool image viewer!” Nothing happens. “Hmmm, it usually comes right up,” he says. “Well, I have a pop up blocker,” I tell him, and turn it off so I can see what he’s talking about.
A new window comes up with a fancy fade in that takes about 20 seconds to display another image of kids playing. I look at it briefly and click to close the window. My browser freezes up and stops responding. I end up having to shut the browser down from the Windows task manager.
“Well, I guess it’s got a few bugs,” he says, “But we’ll get it worked out. What do you think?”
I am at a loss as to what to say. He is obviously so pleased. Do I tell him what I really think or take the polite route? Neither option is particularly appealing.
So I decide to take the middle road.
“What are your goals for your website?” I ask him.
“Lots of visitors! My niece knows where to get this amazing software that will submit my website to nearly a half a million search engines with just one click.” he tells me, “I just have to write up a few quick blurbs, type them in and press go! It’s instant traffic. My goal is to increase my sales by 25% this year with online leads. That’s a nice chunk of extra money if you figure about 25 thousand.”
Now I am really in the soup. How do I tell him that he isn’t going to get millions of visitors, just a lot of spam emails. How do I tell him that the visitors he does get will likely click off to another site before his page even loads? That even if they wait his home page doesn’t take them anywhere that will result in a new lead.
How can I tell him that he really needs to start over again because the website design he has will never index well in search engines, loads far too slowly and will annoy visitors with the automatic music. That they’ll be gone long before he has a chance to tell them anything about what he has to offer.
“I really saved a lot of money on this design,” he continues, “I thought I was going to have to spend a few thousand, but Christy did all of it for $200 and she gave me the search engine software too! It really cost me next to nothing. She’s a really good designer too, isn’t she?”
He knows I am a professional web developer (although he thinks developer is just another word for designer) and he knows that my rates are a lot higher than $200 for an entire website. He has no idea why they are so much higher and he really has no idea that there is a whole lot more to what I do than making a visual design. He thinks that Christy and I are both web designers; we just have different styles.
From his limited understanding of website development, his website has cost him next to nothing. In reality his website will cost him over $25,000 in lost sales, and a lot more over time. He is going to spend dozens of hours of his precious time sorting through spam emails from the free for all search engines and spam email harvesters.
I’m in a tough spot. He’s put me in the less than lovely position of having to tell him that he wasted $200 and a whole lot of his time. Even worse, in the back of his mind he can’t help but think any negatives in my evaluation might be self-serving. After all, this is how I make my living. To his credit, he doesn’t think he’s got me in a bad position because he really thinks he’s got it all wrapped up and besides, he is helping out his niece by shooting her a few bucks. He really is just expecting me to confirm that she did a great job.
Finally, as warmly as I can, I tell him, “Well, it is a nice design, but I don’t think the way it is organized is going to work well for the goals you have in mind and I don’t think you will get the kind of visitors you are looking for from the search engines you plan to submit to.”
“Maybe,” he says, a bit defensively, “but it’s a good start and I can always add to it when I get a few bucks in the door from it.”
I just don’t have the heart to argue the point. He’s got his heart set on all this and I really don’t think he’ll want to hear that the visual design has only one role and that is to enhance the underlying sales, marketing and fulfillment strategies; the brains and muscles of a website.
The really unfortunate part of all of this is that I would have to unteach him what he thinks he already knows, then teach him how it really works before he would actually understand. The way I figure it, he’ll just have to try it out and see for himself. Maybe he’ll come back around when he realizes that I told him the truth. Then again, maybe he’ll just write off the whole idea of having a website as a gigantic waste of time and money.
The moral of this little story? There’s a great deal more to website building than putting up nice looking pages. If you want a website with brains and brawn, you have to start there, then add the nice looking touches.
Keywords:making money online making web pages web pages Website Design
