If you listen to some of the offers out there for cheap websites offered by large providers, they do get your attention. Do it yourself they say. Instant website they say. Low cost they say. Sounds good, right?
WRONG.
Sure you get a cheap website, but guess what? You get what you pay for. You get a template used by 1000s of others. Your brand identity is gone. The whole idea of marketing is to show how your product or service adds value, and to separate you from competitors. Well let me ask you this question. If you are using a template that your competitors can also use, aren’t you saying that there really is no difference between you and your competition? If that is the case, your customers may as well use, Eenie Meany Miney Moe to make their selection of which company to do business with? Seems like common sense, right? You’d be surprised. I met with a potential client, and we really hit it off. We were start on his project the next week. I never heard back, and saw he used the yellow pages to build a site. Wow. Really poor, nothing that tells you how professional he is and how his company had been around a long time. Just a plain, template, and nothing that will get him business. The same boring look and feel as many others. You have to give the Yellow Pages credit though. They know their days are numbered and are jumping in to new media. So they did it the cheapest way possible and will get clients who buy the price, not the job. A brilliant finish carpenter once told me, if they buy a price, not the job, walk away. Seems relevent in web development as well as carpentry!
So what is the difference between RooSites and the cheap instant website companies?
Fair question, and easy to answer.
Listen, I understand keeping costs down and we work with clients to find the best possible solution and try to find away to stay within their budget. Remember your website is your window to the world and provides a first impression. If a potential customer comes to your site and has a poor first impression, you won’t be getting their business.
Welcome to the common sense blog. The basis of our business at RooSites is to create world class websites, that look good, perform well in searches and have quality content. This should be the basis of everyone’s website. Simplistic? Yes, but to me that is what it is all about. If you fulfill the 3 things I mentioned, and you pay a reasonable price, your site should be a success. To me this is common sense, (thus the wonderfully imaginative blog title) but the amount of spam I receive from SEO firms all over the world lead me to believe I am in the minority here….That somehow SEO tricks and the dreaded “We can reverse engineer google” firms know something more than you do.
Let me tell you they can’t reverse engineer Google. Period. No, not a guy in Bangalore, nor a guy in the Ukraine or even a kind of smart guy in Boston can. Unless perhaps you build an army of PHDs you can’t figure out the search algorithm. Ok, I suppose Albert Einstein could have developed the theory of Search rather than relativity had he lived in this point in time. But he didn’t and Dr. Salk ain’t walking through the door to switch to search research either. Please don’t get me wrong, there are legit SEO firms out there, just beware of the firms claiming to make you number one in a short period of time. If they could do it for you, they would do it for themselves. My stock answer when they call is to do a quick google search for phrases “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” and let them know they aren’t in the top 50 (usually 100). I ask them what they charge and offer to double their fee. Of course only if they can make themselves number 1 in the period of time they claim to be able to do for me. I have yet to ever have to pay.
So what do you do? Stick to the basics, hire a good firm (like RooSites) and work hard on your site. The main mistake is putting a site up and forgetting about it. I liken it to a store still selling pet rocks, member’s only jackets and ashtrays. Probably go out of business pretty quick. I recommend making (at least) monthly website updates, (more, much more if possible, weekly is ideal) whether it is news, new products, articles, blogging. Whatever. Give your viewers a reason to keep coming back to your website. In this business, stale = fail, so keep your content fresh!
Anyway, that is it for now. I will be writing when the urge hits me about all things web development….and of course taking a common sense approach.
