Website Considerations
I recently had the following question emailed to me:
Let’s say a new startup wants to have a web site. Should they a.) Hire a web developer and put him or her on staff; b.) Use a template and assign an employee to build and maintain the site; or c.) Outsource the building of the site (if so, should they stay local or look nationally—or internationally)?
Answer: There are 3 major considerations in which way to go here: 1st is where the company is in its product life-cycle. 2nd is money. 3rd is how much design work you have.
I've seen many start-ups get hung up on having the perfectly designed website before launching their product, so much so that the launch is stalled while they tinker with design elements. My read- just get on with it! As soon as you have a name and URL its best to launch something, say an "about us" page that has a few paragraphs about what you do, with the keywords you anticipate people will most likely use to find you - even if you aren't open for business yet. The idea here is to get the search engines to start spidering your page, building associations between your name and your keywords. This is especially the case with domain names that have no association with the product being sold. Getting a template up for this purpose is just fine - it's really quick and cheap because you don't need a designer.
In this pre-launch phase, the most important thing you can spend time on from a marketing perspective isn't your logo or site design - It's your messaging. You need to be able to describe what benefit your product offers in as few words as possible, and test which benefits are most attractive. "Why should I care" is the most important part of your messaging. People are by nature concerned most about themselves, not you, not your product.
To this end, I notice that many CEOs hire their marketing team last, when they think the product is ready to launch, thinking this will save them money. This makes for an extremely weak launch, as the marketing person or team needs time to find the messaging and graphical layout that most resonates with customers. To think you can build an appropriate launch plan in a month or 2 is a faulty assumption. By waiting to bring on your marketing resource, you've actually cost yourself time and money.
Once the product and messaging are ready, I do recommend getting a unique professionally designed website up. You don't need to have more than a few pages to start with, but templates make your company feel small-time. You've heard the term "dress for success"? I think this applies to your website - but keep it simple - again, a few pages is fine! More important is how you get to the point. To this end, many times ideal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and "to the point" messaging work against each other, with SEO experts wanting key-word dense messaging. Be careful of this trap - your most important readers of your site are the HUMAN ones! If the language is hard to get through they will simply abandon your site, ultimately undermining your sales. So please, focus on getting your message across first!
On the local, national or international question, I have found working with international designers and developers very difficult because of language and time-zone differences - Depending on where you are, you may have to wait until the next day to see the results of discussions or changes to see if they fully understood what you wanted. If you do know what you want, working internationally can save money.
I think the real problem is that many companies have no idea what they want, because they think website design IS marketing - it isn't. This becomes at least as frustrating for a designer, who is left with little direction on how to use design to underscore product benefits. This is another reason marketing people are so helpful in this phase - their job is to be able to provide direction to a designer. The good news is that Google has a free tool that helps you test various messages with different page layouts, removing the guesswork out of which messaging and layouts lead to the most sales - Google Website Optimizer.
A full-time designer comes later, when you have so many design needs that working with freelancers or agencies is costing more per month then bringing in a full-time headcount. I find this is purely a financial decision.
go to my previous entry, Website Advice, for more. Keep the questions coming!
Let’s say a new startup wants to have a web site. Should they a.) Hire a web developer and put him or her on staff; b.) Use a template and assign an employee to build and maintain the site; or c.) Outsource the building of the site (if so, should they stay local or look nationally—or internationally)?
Answer: There are 3 major considerations in which way to go here: 1st is where the company is in its product life-cycle. 2nd is money. 3rd is how much design work you have.
I've seen many start-ups get hung up on having the perfectly designed website before launching their product, so much so that the launch is stalled while they tinker with design elements. My read- just get on with it! As soon as you have a name and URL its best to launch something, say an "about us" page that has a few paragraphs about what you do, with the keywords you anticipate people will most likely use to find you - even if you aren't open for business yet. The idea here is to get the search engines to start spidering your page, building associations between your name and your keywords. This is especially the case with domain names that have no association with the product being sold. Getting a template up for this purpose is just fine - it's really quick and cheap because you don't need a designer.
In this pre-launch phase, the most important thing you can spend time on from a marketing perspective isn't your logo or site design - It's your messaging. You need to be able to describe what benefit your product offers in as few words as possible, and test which benefits are most attractive. "Why should I care" is the most important part of your messaging. People are by nature concerned most about themselves, not you, not your product.
To this end, I notice that many CEOs hire their marketing team last, when they think the product is ready to launch, thinking this will save them money. This makes for an extremely weak launch, as the marketing person or team needs time to find the messaging and graphical layout that most resonates with customers. To think you can build an appropriate launch plan in a month or 2 is a faulty assumption. By waiting to bring on your marketing resource, you've actually cost yourself time and money.
Once the product and messaging are ready, I do recommend getting a unique professionally designed website up. You don't need to have more than a few pages to start with, but templates make your company feel small-time. You've heard the term "dress for success"? I think this applies to your website - but keep it simple - again, a few pages is fine! More important is how you get to the point. To this end, many times ideal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and "to the point" messaging work against each other, with SEO experts wanting key-word dense messaging. Be careful of this trap - your most important readers of your site are the HUMAN ones! If the language is hard to get through they will simply abandon your site, ultimately undermining your sales. So please, focus on getting your message across first!
On the local, national or international question, I have found working with international designers and developers very difficult because of language and time-zone differences - Depending on where you are, you may have to wait until the next day to see the results of discussions or changes to see if they fully understood what you wanted. If you do know what you want, working internationally can save money.
I think the real problem is that many companies have no idea what they want, because they think website design IS marketing - it isn't. This becomes at least as frustrating for a designer, who is left with little direction on how to use design to underscore product benefits. This is another reason marketing people are so helpful in this phase - their job is to be able to provide direction to a designer. The good news is that Google has a free tool that helps you test various messages with different page layouts, removing the guesswork out of which messaging and layouts lead to the most sales - Google Website Optimizer.
A full-time designer comes later, when you have so many design needs that working with freelancers or agencies is costing more per month then bringing in a full-time headcount. I find this is purely a financial decision.
go to my previous entry, Website Advice, for more. Keep the questions coming!
Natalee,
Bravo! I totally agree with your article and have had this conversation with many of my clients. I am VP of marketing for a web content management system and I speak with company's on a regular basis that don't understand how to use a web site or what role it should play in their overall marketing strategy. I also run into too many marketing folks that put design ahead of message, strategy, functionality and/or usability. One of our motto's is "Content is King." While having a well designed site is important, it should not drive the decision making process.
Great article!
Thank you!
Mael
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This is a great topic.
I vote for outsourcing the website offshore and I recommend India highly.
They do great work at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been in my area (SF Bay).
This gave my business a big boost starting out because 1)website development is key to my business 2)the cost in the USA would have been a drain on my finite resources 3)I was able to use the money saved for other critical start-up items, notably demo equipment.
I would add that in addition to being much more expensive the local SF web firms did a poor job of understanding my requirements. The Indians responded with a very professional proposal. All I got from the SF firm was a brief email with emphasis on the money they wanted.
Like a lot of Americans I had antipathy toward outsourcing. But this experience proved outsourcing can help a US business get started.
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Another way to approach this question is separating design from development as they are different. You can work with a US designer and then have your site built overseas, since it's easier to find good programmers overseas vs. designers.
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Natalee- what you propose may work for a large web project. For my own experience I am looking at the possibility of a USA team to maintain and optimize the website created overseas in India. I'm looking at this so I can get faster response time. The indian firm I'm working with has their own schedule, rarely aligned with what I need. Quality is high but I have to ride herd on them quite a bit.
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I want to respond to the issue of marketing team hired last by CEO's. This is because most high tech CEO's are eng/ops centric. My tech qualifications could not be higher in my field and I say that is backwards. A product should be positioned BEFORE one dime of eng/ops money is spent. These CEO's leave product positioning for LAST. This is a major reason why most high tech start-ups fail miserably.
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I agree with your point about not waiting for the perfectly manicured site but rather "launch something"
However - few points from my experience
1. Your post mentions both roles "designer" and "web developer" - to the lay business person these are one and the same (although Natalee I'm certain you know the difference) The person who can build your pretty UI is not the same person who can build you a functional web application (or software suite) In fact, I prefer the term "web applications" to "website" because...
2. Gone are the days that a website is simply a business card in hypertext - a company's web presence now is very intertwined with selling / delivering a product and as such, offers rich functionality to a variety of stakeholders. Today, the website *is* the product (or is the customer's view of the product)
3. I don't recommend outsourcing core application development / architecture to India (or hiring web developers from any place other the west / east coasts of the US) Offshore is good for QA, reporting and functions than do not require problem solving. I was born/ raised in India and am very proud of the culture. I have over 12 years of technical project management experience in on-shore, off-shore and hybrid projects at all levels of the enterprise and can tell you that we are not there yet with India being able to build web applications for a company looking to do something that has never been done before. They can implement your A/R module for Oracle but they won't be able to deliver complex, workflow-driven enterprise software to power a start-up. You get what you pay for. For your first 6months (2 dev cycles) hire the best consultants you can find in the US. In month 3, hire yourself:
-2 developers (Sr and Jr)
-1 infrastructure guy
-1 DBA (can overlap with developer)
and scale out from there.
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