I’ve seen it in a couple of places now, most recently on the Australian micro/small business forum site http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/. What am I talking about? Oh yeah, the aggression shown by Web Professionals as soon as someone offers up low cost alternatives to hiring a high-end web design agency. In the latest instance, someone had written a great article on how a small business owner could get an online presence for around 100 dollars, if they were willing to invest time and effort doing the work themselves.
It’s a perfectly valid thing for a small business owner to contemplate doing if they have these three things:
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Lack of budget
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Some time available
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A willingness to learn a few “techie” things
Now that profile matches quite a few budding entrepreneurs I’m sure, so the article was a great idea.
What got me was one of the comments, which started out with a completely unbiased “what a load of bollocks”. Further reading revealed the person making the comment to be a web professional, and he went into the usual thing that pretty much elevates web development to the heights of building a top-of-the-range Porsche from scratch.
Well I say “poo poo” to this gentleman’s “poo poo”. This is the way of the IT industry I’m afraid; 20 years ago customers would pay ridiculous amounts of money for serial cards, relatively miniscule hard disks and PCs in general. The cost has fallen dramatically, and the idea of needing a particular brand of peripheral for a particular model PC is but a fading memory. Software is the same; people used to be able to charge large amounts of money for solutions that can now be achieved using the latest Microsoft Office. It’s what happens when something becomes popular and widespread, costs fall and those who previously elevated themselves to lofty positions slowly start to head back down towards the rest of the crowd.
For what it’s worth, I have no wish to demean or devalue the work done by skilled web designers, developers and graphic designers. These people are still in demand, and will always be able to charge premium rates to create unique web sites. However… the typical micro business, small business, tradesman, sole trader or consultant needs a solid web presence that can get their business “out their”, is fast loading, looks professional and is relatively clean and easy to navigate. This is achievable without spending 1000s of dollars to get a web design consultant to create a masterpiece.
What of SEO?
Now this is one HUGE can of worms, and I’ll be careful to point out that there’s a lot of people doing a lot of good work in getting their clients listed in the search engines. But think about it for a moment, the more people go down this route, the more sites you will be competing with, and the more it will cost to get above them in the search results. Be careful as well of people who will tell you “we get you on page 1 in a week, or your money back”. This kind of promise is going to be in relation to paid search listings – e.g. advertising with Google Adwords and paying for clicks and impressions based on keywords.
SEO is very important to highly automated online businesses, online marketers and so on. But let’s think again about a typical micro business (taking in all the terms I mentioned before, including tradespeople). They need (in fact everyone needs) to be tapping into a “low tech” style of web promotion; including the URL on business cards. signage, bumper stickers and any marketing literature. The fact is that people today expect you to have a “www dot something” and are very comfortable with the concept of visiting an online resource based on a link seen in an offline medium.
The typical micro business operator is likely to start out building a local client base, and building the business through various offline advertising avenues and networking. When you think about the number of business cards, flyers, brochures and newspaper ads that will be published, the potential becomes clear.
But no, some “professionals” prefer to tell people that they need the black magical arts of SEO, that only a true web “wizard” knows the correct incantations to brew up an effective web site. They have a point to a limited extent, but when you read and hear these things, try to smell the fear behind the words. The fear of the mass market and commoditisation.
The article in question can be found here