If You Need a Website…
Dear Person-in-Need-of-a-Website,
Building a website is apparently like building a house. It requires skill and commitment to doing the job right, and much of the longterm success hinges on unseen elements. Unfortunately, I initially went about hiring a website developer the same way I did the last building contractor I hired—to my near financial ruin. When I was thoroughly mired in detached bits and pieces of house, he ran glibly through the proposed budget and took a big swipe at my savings, saying, like a broken record (forgive the dated analogy), “Oh, we’ll be through in about two days. Oh, we’ll be through in about two days. Oh, we’ll be through in about two days....” But that’s another story. Here’s the abbreviated version of the lesson I learned: Never hire a contractor by the hour.
Back to my similarly distressing website saga. I first believed, in new-business-person naivety, that I could simply look around at websites I liked and safely hire the person most frequently credited with their production. And the websites of the first person I hired looked quite good to my untutored eye: no irritating things jumping, singing or zooming out at me, no brash colors. They were clean and uncluttered. What I failed to understand is that he would assemble my website like a brochure, as a series of static pictures, which could be found online by me (since I can spell my last name and know my exact URL) but not so much by Google and other search engines. Search engines look for relevant words and cannot interpret images, whether they contain words or not. Think of building a wall with photographs of bricks, instead of actual bricks and mortar. I had to scrap that website, unfinished, and was out several thousand dollars in the deal. I then, in two subsequent expensive mistakes, hired a programmer who could not design and a designer who could not program. Both I suppose, were a modest improvement over my original mistake of hiring someone who could do neither.
I now realize that website programming and design are two inherently different abilities, not often lodged equally in the same person. I should have been more savvy. I once stumbled into the office of an interior designer, mostly out of curiosity although I did need a few things for the house. The designer sat ensconced amid her wallpaper books and fabric samples like a royal in the private parlor. She looked at me with consternation. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked, in a tone that could have frozen a hot pizza. Her eyelashes fluttered like small trapped moths.
“Well, um, no, I guess not,” I said and backed cautiously away. I cannot imagine having escaped without singed hair, had I added “By the way, do you install plumbing and electric?” I imagine her, with her Ferragamo shoes and pursed lips, standing baffled in front of a electric panel, and am less inclined to believe that a creatively gifted website designer is able, in general, to produce a site both pleasing to the eye and correctly wired, so to speak.
If you, like me, have no idea what such terms as “table-based layout” and “XHTML” mean. And if, like me, you’re ready to bolt at the idea of having to digest yet another complicated morass of information in the interest of protecting your wallet, I suggest you do it yourself, as I finally have, through a company that specializes in helping people totally ignorant about the process of exactly that. OR asking yourself the following three questions as a start, before investing a single dime. The answers should be yes, yes, yes, yes, no:
1. Are the programmer and the designer two (2) separate individuals, both with believable credentials?
2. Are they nice, for lack of a better word? You should not easily envision them rolling eyes and drumming fingers in exasperation when you ask a question that reveals how little you know or worse, regarding your ignorance as an advantage. They should not snort when you ask for reasonable revisions of what they have created.
3. Are they making something YOU can have control over, too, or will you need to contact (and pay) them for every small change or addition you need to make?
4. Are they using a reputable host, not likely to be hacked by someone from Bangladesh? Will they always maintain a current backup of your website?
5. Will the price compromise your children’s college education, your retirement, or your ability to take a decent beach vacation?
Signed (Sigh),
Wiser-but-*quite a bit*-Poorer