Having a website for your business is something you cannot avoid confronting these days. Most small businesses hire a friend, a neighbor, a college student or a freelancer to build them one. The process can be expensive, frustrating and time consuming and go beyond budget if not approached correctly. At the end of the project, you may find yourself with a website that doesn’t quite meet the vision you had when you first got excited about building a website.

A lot of the frustrations lead back to the old idea, “If you want it done right, do it yourself.” After seeing a lot of websites go downhill, I can’t say that I blame you. You as the business owner know your business. You know it well. It’s what you do everyday to succeed and reach your sales goals. So for someone else to get the sense of it can be difficult, especially if that person just dabbles in website design and computers and doesn’t have any formal training or experience in marketing, sales, design or content strategy.

These frustrations lead many small businesses to companies like Intuit or GoDaddy to provide a low-cost, do-it-yourself solution. They pitch a simple solution to the design problem by picking a template, customizing it and then poof! You get search engine placement and your sales go up! But is that the reality? Can you, for a few dollars a month really make an impact online with your business?

Here are a few claims that need to be debunked:

Designing the Website Yourself

Take a look around the advertising world, either online or offline. Can you see and recognize the importance of good layout, color scheme, and overall message and use of imagery that speaks to you the potential buyer? Billions are spent every year on advertising design and branding for a good reason. When a company truly wants to succeed and have a voice online, they don’t adjust a template to speak to their client base. They take time to understand their daily problems, business goals, competitors and customer needs. When you hire a good agency, they should sit down and try to understand your business, your objectives to having a website and then create a solution to address those concerns.

Also, there are technical barriers that come with a template service. Most people don’t understand the importance of image manipulation. If you take pictures of your products or services you cannot simply go from your camera to your website without optimizing the image, color correct the image or use other techniques that give your website what it needs to perform professionally. The results can lead to a distorted image, inconsistent colors and branding, and poor layout, all of which discredit your business.

Usability of a website is the most important thing to an end user. There are many ways to phrase the meaning of usability, but in short, usability is the approach of making websites easy for an end user to basically use your website. “Cool” loading animations from Flash, welcome pages and websites that feature a ton of cluttered content and buttons can make the end user leave your website. If you don’t deliver the content in a way that makes sense, you’ve just lost their attention and they seek out another alternative.

Adding Content and Updating Your Website

The second step after you’ve setup your template based website is to “just add content”. However, recently, this contradicts and breaks every rule for proper website development. In fact, before you even begin to design a website you need to plan for your content strategy. You need to take a good look at your marketing plan, your market, your competition and your branding. What is your voice? How are you going to maintain that voice and govern future content? How are you going to create content that people care about and ultimately moves a person to make a purchase from you? Does your content meet your goals and your user’s goals? Is your content search engine friendly? Do you have the right call-to-action? Failing to answer these and many other questions will not only make your website static and boring, but it will eventually hurt your bottom line.

Search Engine Optimization – Getting Found

Another service that comes with canned websites is the claim that you’ll be found and listed high on search engine result pages. A lot of times they will also try to sell you sponsored links from an internal directory. But do they deliver?

This again brings your content into question. Search engines love relevancy. When you type in keywords you expect accurate results. This is how search engines become reliable and get used again and again. If they don’t bring back relevant results, you simply stop using them. So, I’ll say it again, your content strategy is so very important to consider.

There are in general two types of ways to be placed high on search pages. One is the organic way, the other is by paying for sponsored links. Organic search engine placement requires a good understanding of how search engines crawl and index your website and whether or not your conforming to their standards. This data needs to be compared to your competition and adjustments need to be made over time. (Your competition wants to be placed high on search engines too right?) Proper search engine optimization (SEO) can’t be addressed by a template based website. You need to be able to have access to all your code and content without any hangups and you need to understand how to properly manage both the front end and back end of your website.

So what now?

I know what you’re thinking, you just want a website. Why does it have to be so complicated? Can’t I just get away with putting my product or service online and my contact info and that should be good enough? Well we’ve only scratched the surface to having a successful website and it’s true, it can be overwhelming. But, that is why there are people like me who specialize in building websites and direct the whole process. You can’t do it yourself, we don’t expect you to. Even though a canned solution is cheaper by a daily budget, in the long run you’re going to be paying for dearly for it.

In this economy small businesses are on a tight budget and that’s something I recognize, but proper planning, research, execution and governance of your website can benefit your business now and into the future.