'Quick and Easy' Website Tools Will Kill Your Business
I do this all the time.
Last night there was a commercial about one of those "quick-and-easy" website development tools for small business owners -- like Intuit Websites or GoDaddy's Website Tonight.
I start foaming at the mouth when they air.
You Get What You Pay For
To give you a little context: I've developed websites for 16 years. I hold two awards - first and second place, in the FBLA Colorado-wide website development and design competition. I've spent more time with websites than I have with my friends, and while on some scale, that makes me a very sad sort of techie fellow, it also makes me an expert on the tools and techniques of the Web.
When those commercials come on, I foam at the mouth because innocent, well-meaning business owners get the idea that websites should be cheap. That they should be quick and require no thought to put together. That they -- having all the knowledge of how to wield a mouse, and point and click -- have the expertise they need to design a functional, well-designed website.
Here's the bad news: You get what you pay for.
Welcome to Website Hell
You get horribly invalid code (which affects your Search Engine Optimization or SEO). You get no keywords (another SEO killer). You get no real training on how to design a user interface or map out how pieces of your site should go together.
You don't learn how content works, how content can sell for you, how blogging works, or any other number of tricks of the trade. That's why these "quick-and-easy" website builders will leave your small business in a world of hurt.
It'll be even worse when you see what I charge (my rates are about 10-20 percent of the industry standard, for the record) after believing you only have to pay $8-$50/mo for your "awesome" website.
Using one of those so-called "quick-and-easy" Web development tools aimed at getting your website up in a flash is a lot like wandering dehydrated through the Sahara and coming across a Snake Oil Salesman who has bottled water -- but they won't sell it to you unless you buy and eat a bag of potato chips first.
Hire an expert. Call me a snob if you like, but you know I'm right.
You Want Fries with That?
Let me put it to you another way: If you wanted to build an addition onto your home, would you buy a pre-fab mobile home (those ones you see cut in half on the backs of trucks being hauled all over the place) and then hammer it onto your existing, beautiful two-story colonial?
If you put on a charity dinner for your clients, would you buy the cheapest frozen dinners you could find? Would you serve fast-food meal deals? I'm guessing not.
If you say yes to any of that, you shouldn't be in business.
Now, here's the caveat: If you have no other choice, then the snake oil salesman looks pretty good. If your mother-in-law blows up her own house by way of her new gas oven and needs a place to crash (happy spouse = happy home), that pre-fab looks pretty good since you have no other choice.
If you have no other choice -- you can make fast food work. If you have no other choice -- you can make these tools work for you.
Just remember that you eventually will have to upgrade. "No other choice" is a limited-time prerogative. It vanishes the moment you start looking for other choices.
You can find more from Nick Armstrong on Twitter and at his personal website.
