Most of the enquiries I get about building websites come from people with only a small amount of money to spend. Often they’ll have tried to do it themselves and got into a pickle with something like Moonfruit.
It’s possible to build a perfectly useful and usable website for around £200. If you’re charging £30 an hour that equates to around 7 hours work (or a 9–5 day with an hour lunch break). Enough time to, say, install an appropriate, robust [insert CMS of your choice] theme or template, create the site pages, make some basic mods in a child theme, install a few plugins and set up and integrate a MailChimp account. True, the client’s not getting any ‘design’ per se, but they’re benefiting from my experience, some quick structural work and some basic, top level copywriting. The result should be a site that makes it easy for visitors to find out about the client’s business and do something useful, whether that’s contacting the client, subscribing to something or even buying a product.
But. The problem is that 7 hours doesn’t leave much room for manoeuvre, and if I’m trying to extricate someone and their domain name from Moonfruit, I’m going to spend a fair proportion of that time doing frustrating, boring stuff which often doesn’t seem like ‘proper’ work to the client.
In fact this seemingly peripheral work can prove extraordinarily problematic. The problem with someone who is only spending 200 quid on a website is that they often view the work as purely technical; what they’re paying for is the installation of a CMS and a theme rather than any design and writing experience. Because, as we all know, anyone can choose an appropriate font and write about their business.
Of course the truth is that the basic technical stuff is easier than the design and writing. The ideal £200 client would simply provide information about the business, a logo and some images, answer my questions and leave me to get on with the rest. Unfortunately, what often happens is that the client knows exactly how they want the site to look, what pages it should contain and even how it might be achieved; I’m expected to simply implement the client’s ‘vision’. Time is wasted in explaining why certain elements of this vision might not be conducive to creating an effective website, and establishing a proper professional relationship (I assume you don’t just go ahead and do the client’s bidding).
All websites would benefit from the input of someone who understands design and writing on the web. However, if you are genuinely on a really tight budget and can’t afford to invest in a designer or copywriter (this stuff is important, you know!), it is possible to create an effective website if you follow a few rules.
1. Buy and manage your domain name
Use a service like gandi.net to buy and manage your domain name (e.g. yourcompany.co.uk). Do not buy your website name through whatever system you are using to create your website (Moonfruit, for example) because this will make it difficult to unlink your chosen system from your domain name in the future. Getting your domain name to point to your website takes very little technical knowledge, and any decent website creation system will provide step by step instructions.
2. Use a good website creation system
I’d recommend WordPress, which will host your site for free, lets you manage your website name (see #1) and has lots of (perhaps too many) themes and features. Other systems can create horrible code and can be difficult to extricate yourself from. If you choose WordPress bear in mind that it is primarily blogging software; if you don’t intend to blog you’ll need to choose another system. Blogging is a good idea, whatever your business (see #6).
3. Describe what your organisation does in one sentence
Avoid trendy lingo and keep it factual. Bear in mind you’re writing for an audience that may well be looking through lots of websites; if it’s not clear what you do in a few seconds they’ll close your site. If you can also express what makes your organisation unique without making claims everyone else would make (we’re a creative design agency syndrome) all the better.
4. The website is for your visitors, not you
Write every page, sidebar item and blog post from your visitor’s point of view. Ask yourself “would my visitor gain anything from this?” whenever you add any content. If you can, test your website on real people by giving someone who has no vested interest in the site some basic tasks to perform, such as:
- find the address and phone number
- send the organisation a message
- find out what the business does
- sign up for the newsletter
Watch how easy or frustrating your guinea pig finds the task, and make changes accordingly. A good designer will have experience of the types of problems visitors encounter, and how to avoid or fix them; if you’re paying proper money for your site he or she will research what your visitors want and test how well the proposed design meets their requirements. But remember: any testing, however informal, is worthwhile.
5. Make sure your site does the basics
Blogging, Twitter integration and galleries can be great, but visitors’ requirements are often quite prosaic. Think about what you do when you visit websites for information, and how frustrating the experience can be. Make sure it’s easy to:
- get contact details
- find out what you do
- if appropriate, find examples of your work
- if you have them, find testimonials
6. Blogging
Blogging can help your website in many ways, but it’s important to commit to writing content once your blog is up and running, as nothing looks worse than an unloved blog.
What you should post about depends on the nature of your organisation and your temperament. If you’re offering a knowledge service such as journalism, blogging is an easy fit as it provides a way for you to demonstrate your knowledge, provide advice for follow professionals and customers and initiate a discussion around your subject area.
If you’re offering a more practical service or a leisure activity it’s still worth writing about what you do. For example, if you’re running a restaurant, you could blog the odd recipe, or maybe discuss the difficulties of running a restaurant. You could even write about your menu. The benefits of this are fourfold:
- you’ll demonstrate your expertise and build a reputation with your readers
- you’ll come across as an open and helpful organisation
- you’ll attract traffic from a wider variety of sources. This is especially helpful if you operate in a particularly competitive field. For example, it’s highly unlikely your new website will top the search engine results for London restaurants, but write in some detail about the provenance of your meat, or the care you take with your menu, and you’re more likely to attract traffic from searches such as Greenwich restaurants with locally sourced meat. Tip: Google reflects the internet researcher’s hunger for detailed information rather than shallow marketing copy, so detailed, in–depth articles are particularly useful.
- you’ll create a site which has more life to it than a static set of never changing pages
7. Newsletters and Twitter
Newsletters
People still like email newsletters. Although this seems a rather quaint way of communicating, the intimacy of the email inbox provides a powerful medium for keeping people updated of what you’re up to. I recommend using Mailchimp as it’s really easy to use and the free account provides more than enough credit for small organisations.
Do not spam. A theme that runs through these rules is honesty. No–one responds to skullduggery online, and it’s easy for users to simply block or, worse still, report you to your newsletter provider. To use a marketing term: your brand is determined by your behaviour and how easy to use your site is; the look of the site merely supports this brand. Only send emails to people who have opted in to your newsletter, and resist the urge to sell all the time; you’ll soon lose visitors. That’s not to say you shouldn’t inform your subscribers when you have a special offer on — after all, they’ll more than likely be interested, especially if you’re running some sort of store, but don’t be afraid to use a personal tone and discuss what’s going on in your business.
Setting up a Twitter account takes a matter of seconds and offers the advantage of being very easy to update, whereas writing a blog post can be a chore. Resist the tempatation to place your Twitter stream on your site (it looks disconnected without the context of other Tweeters), unless you’re using Twitter as a way of tweeting simple updates about what you’re up to.
I can’t stand Facebook, so you’re on your own with that one.
8. Relinquish control of the message
The internet’s great strength is that it allows people to look for information on their own terms. Traditionally, communications and marketing departments have tried to control the message their organisations convey and persuade people to buy products via broadcast media. This isn’t possible on the internet as the consumer has a lot more control over what they do and don’t view, the information they receive and how they respond to it. This is a great opportunity for smaller businesses to establish themselves through creating an open, helpful brand, so why not spend a few hundred quid on getting it right by employing someone who knows what they’re doing?