Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Guest blog post by Yowchuan of Meshio.com.  Good piece of advice for businesses looking to build a web site.

A Typical Web Development Project

So, it’s finally time for you to look into building an online presence for your company’s website? Or it’s about time that you revamp the website after hearing from your boss that website is looking really dull for the 999th times.

I would assume that you have a budget for your web development project. I wouldn’t go into how you should come up with this budget, but a budget would give the developer and yourself a rough idea on the scale of the development. You cannot have a RM799.00 budget and ask for everything under the sun. A budget would also allow you to prioritize what features to include in your website, and what features should be implemented in the subsequent phase of your web development pipeline.

Ok, after the Management has approved with your budget, what should you do next? Naturally, the next step is to find a competent developer who can deliver the project fast, cheap and beyond expectations, as unrealistic as that might sound.

So, you post up the jobs, ask around your friends who’s in the IT business and do a search on Google for ‘Malaysia cheap and good web design companies’ or ‘cheap web designers’ or even ‘freelancers who work for free’. And after that, you shortlist 5 of them and asked each them to give you a quote. And you waited for a few days before all the quotes come in, and after looking at the figures you decided to meet with 2 of the cheapest one, and one that quoted the highest (just because you were curious why this particular designer is so different from the rest).

And after interviewing each of them, you finally nail down one company, let’s call them Super SEO Sdn Bhd, and the project begins by paying the web development company a 15% down payment. The project usually begins with Super SEO collecting all the information that you want to put up on to the web for the world to see. All the annual reports, the magazine scans and all your interviews with the newspapers. Next, you also require Super SEO to come up with a few prototypes to give you the ‘look and feel’ of the design. As a matter of fact, you don’t really know what you want, but heck, you can always change your mind, right?

And so it goes on for a few weeks, with Super SEO proposing their revised color scheme for the Nth times, while you continue to browse at your competitors’ website to see what they’ve been up to lately, and to see if there’s any cool features that you might be able to ‘steal’ from them.

If all of the above sounds familiar to you, then you’re very likely to find yourself with a website that did not bring in any positive impact in your sales. Well, at least now your company has a website, and you can include the cool URL on your name card and ironically, other than the URL, there’s really nothing inside the website that you could really shout about to your potential visitor. You begin to wonder why did you spend RM8,000 on the web development project.

My advice? Just get a domain name and have a single page with your company’s address on it. That will probably only cost you about RM150.00. Nothing to shout about either, but it’s going to have the same impact on your name card.

Hold it, now you’re saying that you are really, really serious about building your online presence and how else, other than the method explained above, can you go about it?

Who’s the Architect?

Here’s what I’ll propose, and I think this would definitely work much better than the commonly-used method illustrated earlier.

First, you must know what you want out of the website, and how the website will affect your business’s bottom line. No web developers on this planet can give you this answer, simply because they are just that- web developers. They know nuts about your business, and probably won’t be interested to listen to you brag about your rag-to-riches stories.

Contrary to what you may have been told, if you are going to build a website that works for you, the key architect of the site is none other than you and the people in your company. If it’s a revamp of your existing website, the feedbacks that you’ve gathered from previous visitors, clients and the web statistics will also be an important source of information in working out the blueprint of your web development project. You should be the person deciding the metrics you want to benchmark the website with. How many visitors are you expecting after the revamp? What keywords do you want to position your website with? Which languages do you think you should translate your site into? Which countries are most likely search about your industry and what kind of search engines do they use? Do you have a department in your company that would be able to tap into the company’s web resources and improve their service delivery?

And if you still think that your web developer is going to do all these for you, you’d better rethink your purpose of developing/revamping the website.

The Blue Print is All You Need

So, it’s really not rocket science. What I am really suggesting is that you need to first identify your web development’s need. Figure out the benchmarking metrics of your website and the conversion ratios you are hoping to accomplish. Let everyone in the company chip in and contribute in the planning phase. Get the blueprint of your project done and make changes whenever a better idea or suggestions come along. It’s 80% cheaper to change the features on the drawing board than after you’ve got your website up on the net.

It’s very tempting to hire a web developer based on their portfolio and their client base. Yes, these are important attributes which will help you determine whether they can deliver what you want, how you want it and when you want it. Yet, it’s even more important to engage a web developer who listens to your needs and can help to ensure your blueprint is realistic and achievable. An experienced web developer who can help you to come up with the final blueprint can also dramatically reduce your risk. The blueprint will usually only be a fraction of the entire project cost, but it’s also the foundation of the entire project. With this blueprint, you will have a clear idea of what to expect from the website and you can even bring around this blueprint to any web designing companies which can execute the blueprint for you, exactly the way you want it. Again, this can help to further reduce your development cost and also to ensure that you will not be ‘surprised’ with the end product.

Conclusion

A website is becoming one of the most important tools in an organization’s public communication strategy. You can deliver an impressive message by providing the information that your visitors are searching for with the least effort or you can be turning off potential customers with a few badly designed product purchasing forms.

Whatever it is, I would like to emphasize again my point: Your website is your business.

I’ve been dealing with a well-known web design company who developed a content management system for my customer’s web site. It is found that something does not work properly on the web site. PHP script errors appear on web page when the customer tries to update their web site.

Unfortunately, the web development company does not want to fix the error for the customer, unless they are paid a certain amount (which I think they should not charge at all) to “upgrade” the system. They claim to have developed the scripts using PHP version 4, but now that the server has been upgraded to PHP version 5, the scripts do not work any more. That is, they blame the problem on the server.

I checked the scripts but did not find any problems due to new PHP version. I found the errors as common programming errors, which can be fixed easily by them who developed and understand the system. In addition, the developer could not answer me when asked for exactly what outdated features of PHP 4 that the scripts are using that are not working now.

They refused to fix the problems for the customer, saying that the web site is not hosted with them. But I think this is not a very good reason, because a web site can be hosted and deployed anywhere, not necessarily theirs. They should support the web site no matter where it is housed.

Now they say they are no longer interested in serving the customer, and they say since I am so “expert”, then I should fix the errors for the customer. Well, even if I am in web development business, they are still the one who created the system. I think it is their responsibility to support the customer and not just simply pass the buck and walk away.

Have you been invited to join various specialized Facebook groups lately?  For example, “Malaysia Badminton Network” for badminton lovers and “Malaysia Web Designers” for web professionals?

Yes, I have been joining some of these groups. Also learning about this new way of making money – building recommender community groups on Facebook.

Correct me if I’m wrong. But it works like this:

1. Decide on your passion, such as table-tennis or reading books.
2. Create a Facebook group around your passion, such as “Malaysia Table-Tennis Network”. Decide on what you can offer your group members.
3. Invite your friends on and off Facebook to join your group. Aim for the number.
4. Keep posting useful messages to group members to build your credibility, and make sure they get something beneficial out of joining your group!
5. Once you have reached a critical mass, such as 1000 members in your group, start leveraging the number to make money!

For example, you can contact sport organizations and companies to sponsor events, contests and prizes for your table-tennis sport group. You can help these sponsors sell their products. In return, you may get a cut of the profit.

Another example I’ve witnessed a book love group are doing. They leverage on their high number of members to negotiate with MPH to gain discount for their members.

I don’t know exactly yet how to translate number of members into profits, since I’m not there yet. But since you are leading your many group members now, you have the influence over the group members and “recommendation power” to talk to businesses interested in your group as their target customers.

And once you have achieved success with one niche group, start another group (better be related, I supposed), and leverage on the first group to promote the second!

Just announce to the first group that you have created a second group, then many of them will join you since they already trust you!

Does this business model work? I don’t know. But according to one Internet guru, building recommender community groups is one of the most profitable ventures on the Internet.

And what do you think?

I just started a new chapter in life by enrolling into the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme with Graduate School of Management in Universiti Putra Malaysia (GSM-UPM).  And I feel excited about it! 

Coming from a technical background in software engineering,  I worked as a programmer and software developer, later started my own business.  But the problem is, there is a whole lot of difference between a business run by a technician, and a business run by a business person.

In trying to cross over from a technical person to a business person, there are many skills and expertise I need to develop, including problem-solving, presentation, public speaking and networking, among others.

Certainly no MBA will be the magic bullet to provide everything I need to learn in business.  But it will give me a good foundation in both knowledge and business skills, knowledge being the know how in different functional aspects of business and business as a whole, which I never learned in a class.

But most importantly, it’s the business skills that I’m looking for.  I would not have gone for any academic course in business, if not for its student-centered learning, problem-based learning and self-directed learning approaches by GSM.  Their unique positioning in how they impart knowledge and skills to the students attracted me, apart from being one of the top business schools in Malaysia and Asia.

I’m taking only two subjects per trimester (school term or semester as they call it, as there are three semesters in a year), which is the least number of subjects possible, in order to spread the whole course over 2 years. My subjects this trimester are Organizational Behaviour and Accounting For Decision Making if you are interested to know.

I don’t want to rush as I still have a business to take care. I also think it’s the learning and development process that counts, not just the end result.  Moreover, I don’t need to finish the course quickly in order to get to the job market fast. I’m not interested in job anyway

So I’m glad to be an MBA student now.  It will be an important part of my learning and development plan in realizing my dream in business. I’m going to learn, develop, network and enjoy in the whole process!

Much thanks to my long time customer Ms Alison and business partner Tim for being kind and supportive referees to recommend me for the course.

If you are a current MBA student in GSM, I want to know you! Please add me as your friend on my Facebook page! (Please do introduce yourself when adding)

What do you think of MBA? Feel free to share