Setting a Website for Your Business: Key Points
Posted by JasonThis post was written byIrina Shamaeva, Partner, Brain Gain Recruiting for The Talent Buzz blog post contest.
In these hard times, some of the more adventurous people try to launch their own businesses. Those who are cautious but curious might be investigating this option along with searching for a job if they are in the market. The advantage of starting a recruiting business is that the initial expenses can be minimal.
Are you a corporate recruiter who was laid off and is looking into going on your own? Or maybe you are an “old school” recruiter who feels that it’s time to increase your online presence? Then read on.
One absolute must-have for a business these days is a website. This applies to your business even if you do not really do your business through a website. (The first thing any potential client will do is try to look your site up!) Setting up your website doesn’t need to be a big expense or a long project. I am going to describe the required and the optional steps for a website creation. Though this article is geared towards recruiters, most of the content is applicable to any business site set-up.
To start with, you need to select a hosting service. Your site will be “hosted” by a company (i.e. will be displayed online). The hosting company will also supply you with business email addresses. (It’s the right thing to have a business email address, not just a gmail or a yahoo address, when you are introducing your business to others.) We use one of the most popular companies, www.1and1.com and have been happy with their service. www.Godaddy.com is another major hosting company. The cost for hosting a simple site and a number of email addresses is very small, just a few dollars per month.
The next step is inventing a domain name for your company, or buying a name. So many names have been taken; however, with some creativity and luck you will find an attractive name that is available. The site www.1and1.com (as well as many other sites) has a search box on their front page, where you can enter potential domain names and find out whether these names are taken or not. (As an example, when I was playing with it recently, I ran into a name www.bestitrecruiter.com that was available. If you are reading the article and are interested in this name, I will give it to you free – just let me know.) When you find a name, you need to register it (the typical cost is under $10); it’s straightforward and your hosting company will do it for you.
After you’ve gotten a domain name and selected your hosting company, it’s time to design your site. Back around the year 1999 I used to hand-code my own HTML, but the times and the coding standards have changed a lot. (A few days ago, I was at a playground with my son and saw another Mom reading a very, very thick book on coding websites. She didn’t look happy.) I feel there’s a need to either use website-creating software or hire a professional web designer. Either way it is challenging, however – and here’s why.
If your budget is minimal and you have some technical skills and courage, you may want to try and do it yourself. Most hosting companies will allow you to build a simple site for free. However, these tools have not been “polished” if you know what I’m saying. Those free tools have somewhat limited functionality and a limited choice of templates. There are lots of other almost-free site-building tools that would charge you a small sum if you want to use your own domain name, or remove their logo, and so on. I’ve tried a bunch and I didn’t see a clear winner.
The blog environment www.Wordpress.com is free and it has some site-building features, so it’s an option for building your own site as well. Create an account and try it for yourself. As an example, my blog has “tabs” with content as general, non-blog sites do. A small fee applies if you want a Wordpress-built site to reside on your own URL. This is not a perfect solution but it may suite some.
Now, if you would like to hire a web designer to build the site for you (I did!), where do you start? Easy, you say, it makes sense to post a request online. There are many great web designers out there who will do it for you, perhaps for a reasonable fee. I agree with you. The big, big challenge is, however, how to select a designer. If you post a request on a site like www.craigslist.org (or a site targeted towards hiring experts, like guru.com) you will get a flow of proposals from designers who would be offering their services, along with sending you their online portfolios. When I posted my request about a year ago - and I offered the fee of just $250 for a simple site - I got a couple of hundred responses in the first few days. The portfolios I sampled ranged from clean, beautiful and easy-to-use to unappealing and overloaded with too much graphics and Flash. It was pretty overwhelming and at first I was not sure how to sort this out.
Here’s the set of criteria I ended up having; I recommend it to you too. Look for:
1) A professional response with complete contact information.
2) Clean and usable designs in the portfolio; not too heavy on graphics and nothing “flashing” or popping up from the pages.
3) Attention to your request in addition to portfolio submission.
4) An idea about how your interaction will go during the design process and after. (Only work with a designer who expects to collaborate with you on your site design as opposed to handing you what he/she thinks you need.)
If you start working with a designer that you trust, it may still be helpful to keep some things in mind. Just like a resume, a site needs to follow some conventions. At a minimum, it needs to have “Home,” “About,” and “Contact” pages, and, in case of a recruiting site, contain (or point to) a list of job posts. In our case, we were able to straighten out the design in a couple of iterations and have been reasonably happy with the result.
As for the job postings, we simply use a free service from www.Jobvertise.com and point our candidates there; we’ve used this for years now. This serves as the “Master list” for our jobs. We make sure we also post them on sites that create visibility for the right candidates. If you want to include the job postings within your site, that will require additional work from your designer. Make sure that you will have an easy way to update the list of jobs and a reasonably easy way to update the site’s content if you need to.
Should you also be looking for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Many people would say you must (especially if you ask an SEO expert!). At the cost of making some of the readers want to argue with me, I would say that it depends on your business. For many recruiters, the website’s only purpose is to show that we are a serious business owner and to find out some details about our business. It’s like an online brochure. If this is your case, you really have no need to appear high in search results on search engines like Google or Yahoo (which is what SEO is about). If you are a recruiter, it would probably matter a lot that your job posts catch attention of those who search on the web; but your website is a different matter. With the amount of competition in the recruiting space, you may be looking at big expenses for SEO. In spite of what many will tell you, you may not need that, especially if you are just starting out.
I was hoping to cover the very basics of creating a business website. This is a broad topic; the web is flooded with information on this. I’ve tried to write a short, introductory, hopefully not-too-technical overview that may serve as a starting point on the subject. The views expressed are strictly my own. I am happy to receive feedback and suggestions.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 7:41 pm
[...] read my recent posts: Setting a Website for Your Business: Key Points (how to choose a web designer and do you need SEO?) (this is my post for the Talentbuzz blog [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Wow - you have now idea how timely this article is! You can see from my profile that I have extensive experience in recruting and website development, SEO, etc… That is all I will say for now…
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March 3rd, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Well written and I agree with you on most points. I would say as a professional web developer we are still coding site by hand; the reason for this is most web design packages add in additional HTML and often don’t adhere to the latest W3C standards. In many cases we know HTML/XHTML/CSS so well that it’s more efficient to hand code a page as we want it from scratch rather than to “fix” or “hack” code put together by a package.
As for SEO, as you say it’s main purpose is to gain higher rankings in search engines. However, you will find that SEO, site accessibility (which is a legal requirement in many regions) and general good coding standards tend to go hand-in-hand; this is particularly important for cross-browser compatibilty (especially with support of newer/future browsers such as IE8, Chrome and Firefox 4).
Lastly, web design is only half of the process. A good design can’t do much without the required functionality and that’s where web developers come in - we work closely with the designers to make every button click, every dropdown list, every part of every site work as expected, integrating the site with databases, external web services and data. So be sure that when you see that beautiful design on the table, the organisation also has the necessary skills to make it work!
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Irina Shamaeva reply on March 3rd, 2009 11:16 pm:
Brent,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Good to hear from a specialist!
I agree with you on all points; I have learned some bits too.
I’ve taken some “shortcuts” in order to make this post compact and your comments expand it nicely and in the right direction.
Thanks again,
Irina
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March 3rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Irina,
Very informative for the novice entrepreneur. Good job!
On another subject we a Team Interplay have a data based, validated and powerful technology for recruiters and talent acquisiton professionals that assesses Job Person Fit. Our INTRPLAY DNA technology blows away DISC and MBTI and SDI and all the other more traditional (and dated) tools. We believe that recruitment is a key to retention and so once a candidate is hired the INTRPLAY tools are used to accelerate the on the job “earning curve” and performance. Most other recruitment tools are “throw aways”.
I have an article on the process if you are interested. Check out our clients from Fortune 500 to Venture Capital Firms on our site.
Dr John
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March 7th, 2009 at 2:05 am
Well, one of the biggest mistakes people do is to register your domain name with your hosting provider - then you are stuck with your hosting company and can’t move anywhere to a better service or to a much less expensive hosting provider.
I would say - register your domain name with DomainDiscover.com or GoDaddy.com, but sign up with a decent hosting company, like http://www.inmotionhosting.com/ - they provide the best, fast, reliable and so on.
All you would need is to point your domain name to your host. TBS Multimedia in Boston could always help you out with a set up and web site design.
Web design is better done in NetObjects Fusion (www.netobjects.com) that allows people without HTML knowledge to build web sites themselves and is true WYSIWYG editor. It is available for a fraction of what you would pay as monthly fees to your hosting company for significantly worse web presence.
Additional consulting, web and graphics design, as well as Flash design, webmastering and inexpensive hosting offerings are also available at http://www.tbsMultimedia.com
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March 7th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
As for the SEO, it might be expensive - that’s true, but simply adding META tags to your code (cosult professional about it - it is done in 1 hour, not expensive) gives great results - see Doctor’s Site @ http://www.pediatrichousecall.net/ - a globe logo at the bottom that leads to a counter - almost all of his web site visits are coming from search engines finding his site - all set up by http://www.tbsMultimedia.com in 2 - 3 hours - gives great result and constant flow of a new patients.
So, as they say - consult a professional befire making a decision (just like your tax, legal or other experts)
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March 7th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Hi Irina,
I think you have described the conventional process, but you’re making some assumptions that might not be optimal for every need. Here are some alternative approaches:
1) Start with the domain name, and never let a third party register it. The party that registers a domain name has nearly total control over its use. While most hosting companies are quite reputable, the consequences of misuse or misappropriation outweigh the benefits of convenience. I would also steer clear of any registrar that has been accused by reputable authorities of unethical behavior. Register.com costs more, but they have never tried to appropriate their customers’ domain names or register names appearing in searches in order to auction them to the highest bidder.
2) Before worrying about a web site, worry about email. This is definitely something to keep separate from a hosting company. There’s no reason to bog down the process by tying email to the web site. Personally, I recommend using Gmail for domain names. It’s free for up to 50 email addresses. It’s easy to set up, and for those who want someone technical to do easy things for them, there’s a ready market of firms willing to set up email on Gmail for a fee. (I’ll do it for $50.)
3) Before considering hosting and/or content management software, define the type of site you need. Who is the audience, and how will the site interact with the audience? Static sites work for some businesses, but the opportunities to interact on the web are growing and becoming easier to enable.
4) Depending on the answers in 3), it’s often best not to look for a hosting company. You mentioned WordPress as a possible tool for site building and management. I think that’s a great option, for some. Another blog option would be Blogger, also free, or TypePad, not free. More and more web sites are beginning to use blogware to manage content, even when the sites do not need blogging capabilities. Another possibility is social networking platforms like Ning (my favorite) or SocialGo. None of these options requires a hosting company, and they are all world-class platforms.
5) Your perspective on designers seems too focused on graphic design. Of course, this is what most web designers do. They generally ignore the questions in 3), and it shows. Professionally-produced graphics are generally better than amateurish ones, but graphics don’t drive the value of most web sites. Yahoo and eBay still use their original graphics, which in fact are pretty simplistic. I’m sure you could think of similar examples. Lesson: create a great user experience, and your graphics will be just fine, as long as they don’t take too long to load (part of the user experience, but not the driver).
6) I tend to agree with you on discounting the value of SEO: it does indeed depend on the nature of the business and the competitive dynamics.
7) Off-site activities, presence and branding are also alternatives for some businesses. Look at what Skittles candy is doing. The Skittles “web site” is essentially a frame that pulls in the Skittles Facebook presence and the Skittles Twitter presence. Now, that might not be the most successful approach, but I applaud Skittles for figuring out that they could use some very important features “off the shelf”, available from other providers, without building them into their own web site. I’ll close with an example closer to home: your business web presence includes LinkedIn. I think the implications are obvious, but I’ll happily discuss further.
Best regards,
Jim
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March 8th, 2009 at 3:25 am
Irina,
Thanks for this timely article. I think it is very comprehensive. However, personal branding approach to building your website, as a differentiator, will also add up.
Practical suggestions. Very useful.
Thanks, Venugopal Chepur
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March 9th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Irina,
the article is quite to the point, well-written, helpful to novices. I liked it and found it useful, especially the point about SEOs. You clearly come out as an expert in the field, and the logic and information flow in the article is very good.
Since you asked for feedback, here it is:
I’m not a native speaker, and I try to ask my english-speaking friends to proof-read before publishing. Little things, like an “an” instead of “a”, missing of some prepositions and incorrect usage of “the” shows up. I know it is not a major point here, but I think this is an easy thing to correct and your publication would look even more professional.
Thanks for the great article!
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March 14th, 2009 at 9:47 am
This might be a little off subject, but have you looked at seoclientprospectingrobot dot com? Just wondering if you have any reviews of it, I’m thinking of buying a copy, and wanted to see if anyone had bought a copy yet.
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March 20th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I was wondering how much it would cost to have a website because i am doing a project for a make up company and i would like it if you could send me an email today please. thank you
thank you
Tina Wilson
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May 7th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
This may be old to some but its news to me. Great article and thread. This really helps me. I’ve purchased my domains and I’ll probably use Wordpress and Gmail for my domain. Looking to launch in July.
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June 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Anyone have a GoDaddy account? I need to migrate my shared servers to a dedicated server and not sure how all of that works.
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February 3rd, 2010 at 3:55 am
I saw your site when I was searching for something unrelated, but this page was one of the first sites listed in Bing, your website must be enormously popular! Continue the awesome job!
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