Wall Street Journal Article "How To Create A Successful Web Site For Nothing" Missing Vital Information

August 12, 2008 in business website, business website success, small business websites | No comments

The Wall Street Journal article on the front page of the Monday 8-11 Small Business section titled, “How To Create A Small Business Web Site For Nothing (Or Almost Nothing)” has some mistakes and missing information that could cost small business owners dearly in the future.

In other words, if a small business owner follows it verbatim, they are going to need to spend an inordinate amount of money later to fix the problems.

How do I know? While I am not a web site designer, my firm specializes in writing web site marketing copy and search engine optimization. Both are a bit esoteric but both require a deep knowledge of what works for web sites. In addition, most of the people I subcontract through are web design firms. Many of them are very technically savvy.

Lastly, I am a member of the TC Web Pros, an organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that meets monthly to discuss cutting edge Internet and web design technology.

Now, let’s look at the facts in the Wall Street Journal article:

BUY A WEB ADDRESS:

Yes, you have to buy a web address or URL to have a web site. However, many of the “registrars”, especially Register.com, have started monitoring the web address requests and if you don’t buy them immediately when the one you are looking for pops up, they will buy it themselves and when you come back later to buy it, you will have to pay more.

Also, buying YourCompany.com is usually a bad idea unless your company name is also the keyword phrase people will type into the search engines to find your product or service. It’s very rare that people will type the name of your company into a search engine to find your product or service. They type what they are looking for.

One of the best domain names I’ve ever seen is also one of my favorite small businesses: freeconference.com. The only reason it’s freeconference.com instead of freeconferencecall.com is because someone beat them to it. You have to be thinking marketing and search engine optimization during every decision you make when you decide to create a web site.

FIND A HOME:

Yes, there are companies that will host your web site for free. There have always been companies that will host your web site for free. However, as they said in the article, many make their money by “running ads on your Web pages.”

There are few things that look more amateur than having ads (you have no control over) running on your web site. Unless you’re an information company like Wall Street Journal who make their money off of the ads.

Ads also tend to be a distraction. There is a psychological effect known to professional copywriters called the Zeigarnik Effect. It’s the state of mental tension caused by unfinished tasks. In other words, anything that distracts your visitor (like ads on your web page) will prevent them from completing their task (namely, contacting you or buying your product or service).

In the article, they mentioned a third of small business owners pay more than a thousand dollars a year. Those are businesses that have large, e-commerce web sites. A third said they pay a thousand dollars a year. So that leaves the third who pay less. I have a very large web site and I pay around $20 a month.

Free hosting is going to be very limited and make your web site very difficult to search engine optimize. If you can’t afford at least $20 a month for hosting, I suggest you don’t get a web site until you can afford it.

BUILD YOUR SITE:

Again, while you can use these free hosting services to design your web site for free based on their templates, there are costs involved. Mostly, they concern the compromises you’ll have to make based on having a very generic-looking web site and the lack of options you can offer visitors.

The WSJ article mentioned that you can find plug-ins on the web that you can insert into the HTML code to add things like “calendars”. However, when you add up the time you’ll spend designing the site yourself, writing all the copy, and searching for plug-ins to add to it, you could have paid someone to do it for you and it would look much more professional.

I also disagree with the idea of creating a “welcoming home page”. The worst thing you can do is put something meaningless on your home page (and I’ve seen this on hundreds of amateur web sites), like “Welcome to Softy Widgets web site!”

You have three to five seconds to get someone’s attention and convince them that they’ve found the right web site for the product or service they are looking for. Don’t waste the prime “real estate” at the top of the page on “Welcome”.

And the purpose of a home page is to give visitors a brief run down of sub-headings that they can scan down, find what they are looking for, and then click on a link to get to it. Web sites are about giving people what they want as quickly as possible; not about being friendly. This is business.

GET PAID

I agree with almost everything in this part of the article. PayPal is a good way to go and I use them for some things myself. However, I disagree with Mr. Graydon’s assertion that “their stupid shopping carts didn’t look nice.”

There are some very professional looking shopping carts out there. And, yes, there are some ugly ones. It just requires some patience to find the one that works for you. Or you can follow Mr. Graydon’s method and create your own with PayPal. On this occasion, free is good.

GET SPONSORS

I really recommend not bothering with Google ads if your business is for products or services. I tried them on my own web site but discovered they were almost all ads for competitors to my own products and services.

There are ways to block ads for anything that competes with your business but it’s very difficult to do and it’s almost impossible to block out all competitors.

These ads really only work on a web site like Mr. Carter’s that is informational and full of articles that will draw people to the web site. Then the ads make sense because they compliment the content. Also, it takes years to build up enough content to get enough traffic to make these ads profitable unless you pay a professional search engine optimization firm to get you traffic.

One other option the article didn’t mention was affiliates. You can sign up to sell someone else’s product on your web site or carry small button ads on the side of your pages for their product. It works like Google ads in that you make money if people click on the ad and buy the product.

The differences are that affiliate ads often pay anywhere from $10 up to $100 or more per sale. And you get to pick and choose who you allow to advertise on your web site.

However, I also recommend that you devote a page to selling each of these products rather than just sticking them randomly on your site. And again, without professional search engine optimization to get you traffic now, it will take years to get enough traffic to to make these ads worth your while.

To find affiliates, just type “affiliate ads” into your favorite search engine.

GET KNOWN

Since I do search engine optimization, I’ll recuse myself from this section except to say, the advice is good and you should do what is said, but it will never get you first page on any search engine and if you aren’t on the first page, you might as well not be in the search engines at all.

TRACK YOUR TRAFFIC

This is the best section in the article and all the advice is excellent.

I’d just like to ad that if you really want a web site that gets you business, spend the money to use a professional design firm. There are good ones out there and even design firms that will create a simple “starter” web site for a few hundred dollars that will look professional and is easy to update and manage yourself. Here’s one such designer who offers a simple, basic and easy to manage three page starter web site.

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