Welcome to the third issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

Our goal is to present information that we hope will be useful to you as a web site owner.

Building a Web Site for Minimum Cost

You know you need a web site but the economy sucks and business has been slow. It's an old problem – spending money generates money but it's a tough call when money is tight. Well, we serve small businesses and this is a traditional problem for small businesses, so we have some ideas. We can't give you a web site for free, but we can suggest some ways to get one pretty inexpensively.

First, let's review the ways NOT to do it. Based on the many sad stories I've heard, DON'T:

• Assign your Administrative Assistant the job unless he/she actually has experience doing web sites and has the time to do it
• Do it yourself (What did you say your chargeout rate was? Would you pay that for unskilled labor?)
• Ask your high-school student son or daughter to do it
• Fall for the $300 web site ads on the Internet

OK, so what should you do? To figure that out, let's break down a web site design into its constituent parts and see where we can save some money. A web site consists of:

1. The look and feel, also known as the graphic design
2. The navigation, or, if you will, the menu and the logic behind the menu that lets your visitors find what they want
3. The content; that is, the text and photos that tell a visitor about your company
4. The HTML that makes it a web site
5. The programming that makes a form or database work with a web site

Now let's see how we can save money at each of these steps:

1. Look and feel -- Do you have a graphic designer in your company who could spare some time to design a look for the company web site? How about in your family? Or consider barter.
   
   If neither of these approaches works, talk to us -- there are ways to apply a small amount of money to make a web site look neat and professional without looking amateurish. Look, for example, at http://www.gambitgroup.com. This site was done very quickly (by a professional artist) because one of the Gambit Group principals had about a week's warning that she was about to be interviewed on a business radio show and wanted a good-looking web site to give out on the air.
   
   Whatever you do, don't be your own artist unless you really know what you are doing. A web site designed by a do-it-yourself artist shouts "Amateur" to everyone who visits it. This isn't the image you want to portray of your company, is it?
2. Navigation -- If we're talking inexpensive, then we're talking simple and small -- 5-7 pages at the most. The navigation and menu issues should therefore also be simple. However, the categories can be important. We can create the categories for you, but it's much less expensive if you start the process yourself. Think through what your company does. Put yourself in the position of a new visitor and decide what categories you would want to see that would give you the most useful information about your company with the least confusion. We can help, but if you've thought it through we can do it faster and it will cost a lot less.
3. Content -- Writing or editing for the web is different from any writing/editing you've done before. But it took some of us years to learn to do it right. Rather than trying to learn the tricks overnight, learn instead to make it easy for the editor (easy editing = fewer editing hours = lower cost). Make sure that everything you need to say is in the text even if that makes the text wordier than you would like -- it's much easier for the editor to cut things out than to figure out what's missing and track it down. And organize the text carefully so that different subjects are clearly separated. Then spellcheck it. And finally, have someone who has never seen it before look at it -- we guarantee they will find at least one typo.
4. HTML -- Don't even bother with this one. The tough stuff (converting a design to HTML) is too tricky for amateurs and the easy stuff (converting text to HTML and setting the typeface correctly) just doesn't take that long. Let us do it.
   
   And PLEASE don't try to "help" by using MS Word's HTML conversion feature -- it actually takes longer to clean out all the garbage Word generates than it does to convert plain text to good HTML. Our authoring program (Dreamweaver) actually has a "Clean Up Word HTML" command, but even it leaves behind some garbage that must be cleaned up by hand. Word 2000 is worse than Word 97. And we haven't dared try Word XP yet.
5. Programming -- This one is easy: Don't. If you are looking for an inexpensive web site, don't fool around with databases and complex forms. If you want a simple contact form, we can do that for you in an hour or so. Just be prepared to tell us what you want on the form and be careful to minimize the number of items you ask a visitor to enter -- people are more reluctant to fill out long forms. Anything beyond a simple form, however, and you have departed the realm of inexpensive web sites.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110