Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Business owners today are well aware that they need a website to be more accessible to their customers, but they often make a vital error – they tend to approach web developers empty handed. Armed with nothing more than just the desire to have a website, business owners rarely prepare a defined job scope to help web developers understand their expectations. On the other side of the coin, web developers tend to be over confident, thinking that they’re experts in ‘everything.’

As a result, most web developers fail to grasp their customer’s true requirements, and most times, they rush to ‘close a sale’ and fight to stay afloat in the ever-competitive web industry.

Clearly, this situation and the disputes that usually follow, aren’t ideal for business owners or web developers. The seemingly endless design corrections and frustrating arguments that go back and forth will make the business owner think that the web developer is incompetent, and the web developer will start to label the customer ‘fussy.’ When the web developer doesn’t deliver on time, or the customer holds the payment, it becomes yet another project failure that could have been avoided in the first place.

In the world of business, they say the customer is always right, which is true in many ways. For many web developers, a project can sometimes appear like a line of HTML code, but that’s not usually the case, not everything is as it seems. A project is complex, and comprises of a good mix of management and development. Here’s what we think are the five pillars of a successful project:

1. The negotiator

The negotiator’s job is to meet customers and understand their requirements and expectations. He or she can also help customers decide on a budget, inform them about what a website can do, and understand a web developer’s job. When both sides agree on a preliminary budget, the negotiator’s role ends.

2. The proposal writer

A good proposal is one that can be understood by everyone. It shouldn’t be technical, but it should put the customer’s expectations down in written form. It will define the job scope and note what items are to be delivered.

3. Administration

The administration side of the operation follows standard procedures to get the paperwork done. They issue official quotations, receive purchase orders, send invoices, receive payments etc.

4. The project manager

This person forms a bridge between the customer and the web talent. He or she assigns tasks to the team and makes sure that deadlines are followed. It is also the project manager’s duty to inform the customer about the progress of the project and to ensure that everything is going to schedule.

5. Specialised team members

A web project has to be broken down to smaller tasks. This is one of the hardest parts of the project, as someone must search for talents and identify their area of expertise. Specialisation eliminates errors, is the key to keeping costs down, and improves the value of each team member.

A team member who works on a specific aspect of the project will eventually become skilled and excel. If you have a team of specialised talents, the possibility of the project going smoothly, and as planned, would be much higher than that of a ‘one man show’. Each talent must be given an introduction to their job scope and recognised for their professionalism. Ultimately, your database of skilled talents can help you seal the deal with your customers.

(Pin will write more on individual roles and how to turn expectations of web owners and web developers to writing)

About The Author

Are you a web or apps developer? You are invited to join http://groups.google.com/group/friends-1-com-my

Pin is the founder of 1.com.my. He hosts email and websites for his customers on Cloud. He has written two books on Online Business and Linux, and he also founded a Web Developer Group that has over 100 friends. To learn more, please visit his website at http://www.1.com.my

This is a guest post from Pin, the founder of 1.com.my. He runs a company that hosts emails. Pin is very kind to offer to help you solve your problem related to your email hosting. Just let him know what it’s about.

1. Web developers do not deliver a good job (I have tell you n times about everything you need to know, including inserting auto-play background music. I have also given you guys a benchmark website which I want – I want it to be similiar or better than Dell’s online ordering website. I have budget, yes I have!)

2. My site ranking is poor, something is wrong (Why other websites are listed on the the first page of Google but not mine. I should engage my friend who is a SEO expert working in eOneShreak)

3. Isn’t my website should be fully automated (What I want to say is, web developer should create an auto-pilot website or money making machine version 2.0. I just need to sit there waiting for money to come in)

4. Keep my online business ideas confidential (My ideas is first in the universe. I have discussed this plan with God and both of us agreed that this will hit and overtake Facebook. You are lucky to be involved in project like this)

5. The site is not what I want… (Isn’t that you know everything about website? You should propose something fresh, innovative, better, faster….)

Web developer says:

1. Well, we are afraid that this is what we can do with your limited budget (Even given the same budget as what Dell has invested, you are only a copycat and your business will fail because a website is not an online business. You need to have strategy to make it work and remarkable)

2. There is no overnight trick to make your page to first in Google (Idiot, do you know what is PR? Not Public Relations but Page Rank)

3. We have done all the integration right (If we are able to come out with such thing, we would not be here doing the website for you. You know, you don’t even buy anything online before and you expect your online business to be built and money piling up in your Paypal account. Again, do you have Paypal?)

4. Sure! We will keep this ideas to no one including my cat. My fish do not talk but I won’t tell them too (This is the n times of people mentioning this ideas. To make you happy and to make sure we get the project, we will agree that you have done all the search in Google and happily confirmed that you find no similar website or ideas)

5. Let’s us try again and we hope it is closer to what you want this time (We have another final payment to collect so we will have to bear with you a wee longer. We do not understand what do you mean by better, give us clear guideline)

This is a guest post from Pin, the founder of 1.com.my. He runs a company that hosts emails. Pin is very kind to offer to help you solve your problem related to your email hosting. Just let him know what it’s about.

1. My site has no visitors

(Web developer: It is not within our scope of work. Our job is to complete your project and make sure the final payment are deposited to our bank account)

2. My online sales is slow

(Web developer: You own a restaurant. Your contractor are working on the renovation. Do you expect your contractor to guarantee your sales? We are more or less the same. Your website is a business to you, but it is only another project to us)

3. My site has never completed

(Web developer: The changes are never-ending. If you stop giving us more updates, we can get it done anytime)

4. The design sucks

(Web developer: We are designers, please trust us. If not, why would you engage our service? Anyway, you are the boss, we would still listen to you and make the design sucks for you, who cares?)

5. Why so expensive?

(Web developer: We, web developer, are dedicated to create a website with extraordinary patience. A lot of effort are spent to make sure you are the ONLY person in this world to like the website, not anyone else.)

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.