Often, the web design company held the domain name and webhosting in their own account. One client in particular was only given partial access to their Joomla site, so I couldn’t back it up to migrate it, update plugins or add (and edit) users to give MYSELF full access. One company even changed the ftp login when they found out that they were losing the client!

There is an easy solution for this: control ALL of your own logins. It’s easy to let a company register your domain name or hosting, but you should take the time and do it yourself. NEVER let your web design company hold the registration to anything. If they need to access your hosting account (as they will), give them the login. But keep everything in your own name. That way, if your logins are ever changed, you can contact your hosting company and have them reset the login and send it to you.

Doing it yourself will take extra time, but it will be worth every second.  Trust someone who has seen this happen multiple times, and has had to deal with it (and charge the client for our time).

1. How many small business sites have you built? If you look at a relatively new web design company, their portfolio will likely include sites that wouldn’t be considered business websites, because they are building a body of work, and haven’t gotten much work in the business field. But experience is important, because a small business site has completely different requirements than a website for a band or a small charity. Find a designer who has been doing this for awhile, and knows small business.

2. Have you built websites for my particular industry? A restaurant site is relatively easy to get decent traffic for, while an HVAC website is a lot tougher. Restaurant sites (for example) are routinely used for people to find their location, menu, specials, etc., but an HVAC website (again, just an example) will usually have much lower traffic. It’s just the way the industry works. Some industries can use Google AdWords (basically an advertisement on certain Google results pages) and some industries would lose a lot of money by doing that. Knowing the difference, and how to build a site accordingly can save you a lot of money.

3. What do you know about search engine optimization (SEO)? This is a tricky question, because it’s an ever changing field. A few years ago, the title (on the top of the browser window) was so long that it routinely ran off of the page. But now, Google only “sees” approximately the first 160 characters. Meta keywords used to be important, but Google hasn’t used them in years. The best thing to do is to ask the designer to show you the Google Analytics numbers for some of his sites. If he doesn‘t have them, leave immediately!

4. Is your web design up to date? Like SEO, this changes with time. An older site will look narrow on a widescreen monitor, because it was built back when everybody was using the clunky old CRT monitors. Look for Flash on his websites. Flash doesn’t show up on smart phones, so ask him what happens when a smart phone sees the site?  If he tries to give you a lame excuse, or says that smart phones don’t matter, leave immediately.

5. Do all of your websites look the same? This is easy to find out. Some designers are one trick ponies, and all of their sites are very similar. Watch out for a designer who always uses a gigantic slider or slideshow on every site, because this is definitely an industry related option. Make sure that all of the sites don’t have the same basic color scheme. Also, stay away from a designer that works in black a lot. While black is great for some industries, it is often a crutch, because it’s much easier to make a black website look good. Make sure that your designer is talented AND creates a variety of different designs.

6. Do you do content management? This is a bit of a trick question, because not all businesses NEED content management. A content management system (known as a “dynamic” site as opposed to the older “static” sites)  is edited online, so the client can keep the site’s content up to date, add new pages, and interact more easily with his clients. The important thing is that a web designer needs to KNOW about these things. And a good web designer can do both “dynamic” and “static” websites.

There are a lot more relevant questions you should ask, but this is a pretty good start. The important thing is to make sure that the designer you choose is experienced, knows about your specific industry, and is up to date on modern SEO techniques. Well, all that, plus being a great designer…

If you have any questions, either comment, or CONTACT us.

We’ve been doing this for ten years, and Richmond Media websites cost between $1400.00 and $12,000.00. So what’s the difference between our websites (or any other company that does small business sites) and those cheap ones? Are the cheap ones any good at all? Can they do what you need a website to do?

First off, you need to realize that the cheap sites are built from templates. This means that they have the design basically in place, and you (or the web design company, depending on the type of site) will add your content to that pre designed website. Let’s take a quick look at what a small business website needs to do:

BE FOUND BY YOUR CUSTOMERS

There are a two ways to do this.

1. Promote your own website outside of the internet by posting your site address on your print ads, business cards, etc.
2. Use search engine optimization to increase your ranking by search engines.

You can certainly promote your website yourself, and this might be somewhat effective for a VERY small business that serves a very small area.  But to really get traffic, you need what’s called search engine optimization. This requires keywords and phrases to be used both in your site’s page text AND inserted into the code in the site’s pages as “meta tags”. Many templates allow you to add your own meta tags, but how do you find the right ones to use? At Richmond Media, we’ve been doing this for a looooooooooooong time. Do you think you can do it as well as we can?  If not, your website simply will not compete with a professionally designed website.  And if your website can’t compete in the marketplace, what’s the point in having a website?

Remember, a website is basically a form of advertising. Would you shoot your own TV commercial? Produce your own radio spot? Would you trust yourself to do a great job buying time on radio and TV stations? What if you got an email claiming that you could get a TV spot for $299? What if the small print said that your TV spot would use the same sets as a bunch of other TV spots, and that you’d have to write and produce it yourself? How do you think that would work out?

Staying with the theme, “But wait! There’s MORE!!!!”

ENGAGE SITE VISITORS

As you build your website, you have to not only attract traffic, you have to give that traffic a good reason to stay there and see what you have to offer.  The thing is that Google continually changes the rules for ranking websites, and you have to follow those rules, while at the same time, keeping your site interesting to site visitors.

The key is content and navigation. You need great content that will keep people on your site, and you need that content configured so that people can find it easily, and so that your Home page compels people to click the right buttons to find it.

Do you know what a “call to action” is? That’s a part of your Home page that compels people to click the links to go where you want them to go. If you own a restaurant, you want people to see your menus, a map to your location, your hours, and any specials you might be running. Do you know how to direct traffic to those pages? We do.

Do you know what Google Panda is? That’s the new algorithm Google uses to rank sites, built upon the following premises: People do not like to read a bunch of text, and people nowadays want to immediately see what they want, and they want to be able to easily find it. Unlike the way Google used to work, Google Panda is based upon getting people OFF of your Home page as quickly as possible, and into the interior pages of your website. Do you know how to do that? Does a template (of unknown age) allow for this?

That’s just scratching the surface, but I hope it gives you a decent comparison between cheap template websites and professionally built websites. So, if you can only afford a $10 sweater, should you buy that sweater, or find a way to get a better one that will last? Richmond Media (and a lot of other web design companies) sometimes let clients pay on time. Ask us, and maybe you can get a $50 sweater for a few months of $10 payments. Because that sweater will last a lot longer, look a lot better, and it will keep you warmer.

Contact us if you have questions!

Other hosting companies have similar methods, so this will be helpful no matter who you choose to purchase hosting from. if you have any questions, ask them in a comment below, or contact Richmond Media.

Apple Time Machine

So you got a brand new computer for Christmas! So how to you protect that computer’s data, once you’ve installed apps, added videos and pictures, and everything else you put on your computer? If you got a new Mac, you’re in luck. Apple’s Time Machine is an excellent, worry free backup system. But if you got a Windows machine, no such luck. But Richmond Media has some holiday advice.

Most computer systems no longer include “Recovery Media” (Disks or CDs used to restore your computer system to it’s factory shipped state). Many do not even include Operating System disks. This is not specific to systems purchased from any one company, but now standard practice throughout the entire industry. However, many manufacturers include software on the hard drive that creates recovery media for you. This allows burning your own set of recovery CDs or DVDs – all you need is the blank media.

Inclusion of such a recovery utility varies by manufacturer and model; not all manufactures and models include such a utility. For those that include such a utility we recommend you create your own set of recovery media after completing the Windows installation. In other words, right after you start using your PC! If you fail to do this and encounter a difficulty in the future you may not be able to properly restore your computer.

Some manufacturers may have physical recovery media available separately for purchase; consult your owner’s manual support information section for additional information. Systems that do not come with a CD/DVD burner may still include Recovery Disks – please check the manufacturer’s specs.

Additional Resources

Below are some links for you to learn more about keeping your data backed up:

13 Terrific Cloud Services for Small Business – Storage and Backup

Five Best Windows Backup Tools

SugarSync

iDrive

If you have any questions, ask them here as a comment, or contact us.

LeYaca's old website

LeYaca is a French restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia that has been in business for 25 years. They have a great reputation, and in my opinion they are the best restaurant in Williamsburg, bar none. We built them a website in 2007, and we did it right, for the time. The header was an elaborate Flash slideshow (with gypsy music), they had a lightbox gallery, and they even had a QuickTime panorama of their main dining room.

Considering the year, the website was loaded with features. They added a 3rd party registration system (Open Table) in 2008, and remained relatively invested in their website.

In November/December of 2008, they had 1,179 site visitors, with 3,124 page visits, a decent showing for a restaurant in Williamsburg.

By late 2010, the website was definitely showing its age. QuickTime panoramas were a thing of the past, the SEO was old, the look was more for the old. narrow CRT monitors. I did a few mockups and met with the owner. He wanted us to design a really “artistic” website that would stand out and be unique for the area. Since they weren’t very technically savvy, I decided to stay old school and go with an html site, since they offer more freedom in design.

LeYaca's current website

I tossed out EVERYTHING, and built a widescreen site with a split, translucent content area over unique background photographs for every page. We added a beautiful broadband slideshow, a huge embedded Google Map, an expanded menu section and more. LeYaca paid a small maintenance fee to have their special menus changed weekly, and holiday specials were changed on the Home page as they came and went.  We also amped up their email campaign.

And now, November/December of 2011 so far, they have had 3,544 site visits and 9,223 page views – almost triple the previous site’s numbers. In addition, they were just proclaimed 1 of the 100 best overall restaurants in the Nation by the diners on Open Table in 2011, winning the OpenTable Diner’s Choice – 2011 Annual Winners – Best overall.

Now I am certain the the great food, ambience and service had something to do with the success of the website and the restaurant… but we will take a little credit for Richmond Media too, along with the restaurant’s owner, who knows when to rely on the experts to get the job done right.

It’s a decision made by thousands of small business about not only their website, but about advertising in general; do you go big, or go small and hope that will get you through? So let’s look at both budget html and content management (which we will refer to as CMS) websites, and what they can and cannot do for a small business.

An html website is the kind that’s been around since the nineties. The web designer creates a basic look, copies that look over to a bunch of other pages, adds your content to them, and presto, you have an html site! And as a guy who makes more money from CMS sites, I will admit that for some businesses, an html site will do just fine.

An html site is great if your business is rather small, if you don’t need to change the information on the site very often, and if time stands still forever. By that. I mean that an html site is STATIC. An html website doesn’t change. Any website that’s five years old is going to look very narrow compared to modern sites, because back then we designed for those clunky old CRT monitors. Now we use flat screens, and the sites are a lot wider.

An older, narrow design		A wider modern design

A lot of decent five year old websites use Flash in one way or another.  But iPhones can’t see Flash, and if you think that doesn’t matter, you would be incorrect. And those older sites, when they are optimized for search engines, are using five year old optimization. But Google has radically changed the way it ranks websites.

A CMS site on the other hand, can adapt to changing times, and changing needs for a small business. It’s true that CMS sites are more expensive, their content is stored in a database, which has to be set up and populated with content. But the upside is that you have a DYNAMIC website, which means that it’s not static, it can change any time you want to change it.

Let’s say that Google radically changes their ranking system. Your site can easily change along with it. Let’s say that SUPER widescreen monitors become the latest rage. Your site can use a modified theme and change, while keeping all of your existing content. And CMS sites can change content whenever you want to change it. Do you have weekly specials? No problem. Do you want to change your business hours? It takes a minute or so, and they’re changed.

Do you want to add a new page for a new product or service? With an html site, your web designer has to do that. Then the web designer has to recreate your site’s navigation menus on every page, to add the new page. And then you have to pay him.  For a CMS site, you create the page, save it, then add it to the menu, which adds it to ALL of the menus. You are done.

So to sum up, yes, sometimes you can get by with an html website. Lots of businesses don’t need to change their websites very often. But if you do, I would recommend CMS for you. If you can’t afford it, ask about paying in installments. Not all companies accept payments over time, but we do. If you have any questions, ask them by commenting on this blog post, or contact Richmond Media. I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.