“My web designer  registered my domain name, and never turned over the rights. Now he owns it and I can’t get in touch with him!”

“My web designer has all the username and password information to my website domain and web hosting, and now he’s out of business and I can’t update my site!”

“The web designer who built my site didn’t give me a means to make changes to the content myself, so I have to track him down for every minor update.”

These are all very, very common complaints and I’ve each of them many times over. Fortunately, if you’re aware of these pitfalls before hiring someone to design your website, they can be avoided completely.

Retain control of your web address!

Ideally, you should register your web address/domain name yourself, but sometimes it’s simpler and more expedient to have your web designer do that for you. If you do decide to entrust this to your web design person or company, be sure to:

• Find out where they’ve registered your (some of the more popular domain registration sites include GoDaddy.com and Network Solutions) site and have them print out and give to you all of the registration paperwork. This will include the registration & expiration dates, the technical and administration names, and the username and password needed to log in and make changes to your account.
• Have all the domain name information, call the company (or you can do this online) and have them transfer the ownership of the domain name to you. If the domain was registered by the freelancer or agency, you’ll need them to complete this step. Repeat, DO NOT allow them to retain ownership of you web address. You may allow them to retain their information within the Technical Contact area, but you should be registered as the Administrative Contact.
• Change the password when the web designer has completed your site. Don’t leave it as-is, because then they’ll have the means to gain entry to your site and make unwanted changes to your account and your web hosting.

Know your web host

Quite a few business owners with websites have no idea what company is being used to host their website. This is important information because all of the files that comprise your website resides on a web server at a specific hosting company. You need to know who that is and have account access in the even that you want to hire a new designer to update or redesign your site. If you don’t have access to this, then everything that’s currently on your site is inaccessible.  Once again, be sure to:

• Know the name and contact information of the company that hosts your website.
• Have all the login info to you account — username, password, account ID number.
• Change your password to something that only you know; Don’t leave that information in the hands of an outside party.

Be sure you can easily update your website yourself

During the process of interviewing individuals (or companies) to design your website, remember to ask them if they’ll include a way for you update them the site yourself, without requiring their assistance or intervention. If you really want to show them that you know what you’re talking about, ask them if they include a Content Management System (or CMS) in the creation of the website. When inquiring about this, here are a few things to remember:

• Ask the web designer what kind of CMS will be installed. There are a number of popular ones, such as Joomla, TextPattern, Expression Engine, and my favorite, WordPress — among numerous others.
• Ask the web designer to give you a demonstration of how to log in and use the CMS; This way, you’ll at least get a sense of how difficult or easy it will be to update your site. The better content management systems are very user-friendly, although they will take some time and training to fully master.
• Learn whether or not the person developing your website will provide at least some instruction in using the CMS, and whether they can provide some useful resources and tutorials; WordPress, for example, has an excellent video tutorial site at www.wordpress.tv.

Interviewing and hiring someone to design your website can be a daunting process, and the buyer must be cautious and aware that there are many unscrupulous and incompetent individuals in this field (like most, I suppose).

With a bit of research and preparation though, you’ll have a much better chance of hiring a good, solid Web professional and can avoid the difficulties and headaches that often present themselves down the road. And as always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Good luck and Godspeed!

There are pros and cons to each one of these possible paths, and we’ll explore each of them.

Hiring a full-service Design Agency

Going to an established design agency is normally where most mid-sized and larger companies turn for their website and graphic design needs, and there are many advantages to this. An agency/firm, unlike a home-based individual freelancer (like myself), typically has a staff of professionals to handle all aspects of their clients’ needs. These on-staff pros typically include graphic designers, front-end UI programmers, Web developers and database engineers, SEO specialists, sales people, account managers, and project managers.

The full-blown design firm normally has a *real* office space with conference rooms, fancy projectors, flowcharting software, and more. These accouterments and a large, multidisciplinary roster of employees is necessary when dealing with a significant volume of high-end and sophisticated projects for larger corporations.

The design firm is an excellent way to go for companies that are mid-sized and larger and have a substantial budget. This type of full-service agency, unless it is very small and/or in desperate need of work, generally will not even consider looking at any project that’s less than $5000 — and for many, that’s far too low. I know of quite a few agencies that don’t take on any projects under $15,000 or $20,000. Considering the overhead (office space, employees, etc.) in running a full-service agency, this is not an unreasonable position to take.

Many small business owners may be shocked at the fees that full-service agencies typically charge to create a customized website; but then most small business owners tend to underestimate the level of expertise and amount of time it takes to create a high-quality, professionally designed website. Couple this with the overhead involved in running a Web design & development company staffed with highly paid pros, and I’m sure you’ll understand that it’s not an economically viable strategy for them to work with smaller companies with limited budgets.

Template websites: Going the Do-It-Yourself route

On the other end of the spectrum from hiring a full-services design agency that employs a team of experts is using the old DIY method — Do-It-Yourself. There are many free and inexpensive website templates and WordPress themes available, so why not go that route?

For the very small business, new start-up venture, or individually-owned company or solopreneur, this isn’t always a bad option although it’s far from an ideal solution. However, you must have at least some level of technical expertise to get even a do-it-yourself template up and running and correctly configured. If you’re a technophobe or just plain inexperienced at this sort of thing, this can be a daunting and difficult task, and quite a time-consuming one.

You should also realize that the template that you’ve chosen, while it may offer some limited amount of customization options, is a template, and any number of other companies are probably using this very same template — perhaps even your competitors.

As I said, many of these pre-fab websites can be modified to some degree, and others can be effectively “skinned” to look quite unique. However, skinning a template requires delving into the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and the underlying HTML source code and making modifications there, and that’s the domain of the professional web developer. This is not something the average small business owner is prepared or able to do.

In the case of most template sites that are self-hosted (meaning you can use your own domain name, which is crucial) there is often a need to set up a database, particularly if your site has an integrated content management system, such as WordPress, Drupal, or Expression Engine. This is something that many hosting companies allow the individual to do, but again, you may not be comfortable in working with this level of technology.

You must also consider the time that it may take you to handle all these tasks yourself. If you spend a week or even a day trying to set up your own website template, how much money has that cost you in terms of lost opportunity and potential revenue? That’s time you could have used to work on other areas of your business, such as acquiring new clients or completing projects. Your time is worth something and it’s usually best to focus on your core competencies when self-employed or managing a small business. Don’t waste time struggling with issues in which you lack expertise and experience.

The template route is obviously not an ideal solution, but for those companies that can’t afford a fully customized website and feel this is the best choice, then I’d advise hiring a professional Web designer/developer to do this for you. This won’t be free of course, but most pros can do this without charging an exorbitant fee or busting your budget.

Hiring a freelance Web designer

The third route you might consider is to hire a freelance website designer & developer. This is often the best option for the solopreneur, small business, or budget-minded mid-sized company. But be warned: treading this path is often fraught with pitfalls. For better or worse, Web design is a business where anyone with a computer and a couple thousand bucks worth of software can gain entry, and there are many individuals who have hung out their “website designer” shingle who don’t know much more than their customers.

Many of these freelance designers simply upload preexisting templates or reuse existing designs that they’ve created, passing them off as original work. I recently consulted with the owner of a local jewelry store here in NJ, and he asked me to review his website. It was very amateurish and looked like a bad template. Furthermore, he had no way of updating the site himself, so every time he wanted to post something about a sale or any new items available at his store, he had to call the Web development company that built his site. The web developer would then charge him handsomely for each update. He went on to tell me that he paid $2500 for this website and then asked me if I thought this was expensive.

I truly felt bad for the man, but I was obligated to give him my honest, professional opinion. I told him no, $2500 is not an unreasonable fee for a good website, but for this website twenty-five hundred dollars was ridiculous. I can’t imagine that it took the website designer more than an hour to complete — if that long. Now, $2500/hr is pretty good money if you can make it (I know I wouldn’t mind making that kind of cash), but it’s morally unconscionable to charge someone that kind of money for something that takes next to no time or effort to produce. They obviously took advantage of the man’s inexperience and lack of knowledge.

$2500 is actually about the average cost of most of the websites you’ll find in the portfolio section of my website, but I didn’t spend anything less than forty hours on any of them, and often much more time than that.

Regardless of those bad apples (I’d like to say “few bad apples”, but there are more than a few), if you look around, you’ll find that there are some truly excellent freelancers available for hire. When evaluating freelance web designers, you’ll want to look at their portfolio and compare them against others in their field. The more sites and portfolios that you view, the better sense you’ll have of what is “good design” versus poor design.

Also, be sure to learn as much as possible about the freelancer’s qualifications. There are some that are excellent programmers and developers, but poor designers. Others are basically graphic designers that “also do web sites”. If some does websites as an afterthought/add-on service, that’s the wrong person to hire. My local print shop does very nice print work and a few years ago decided that they’ll “do websites too”. They’re awful. And even if a website that’s completed by a graphic design company or freelancer is visually attractive, the underlying code structure and search engine optimization are probably much less than ideal. For the layman though, these factors are much more difficult to ascertain.

Web design and development is a specific discipline unto itself and requires a wide range of skills. Any good, competent freelancer that you consider hiring needs to have a solid grasp of graphic design, an excellent knowledge of Web usability issues, a thorough command of front-end website coding techniques, and at least some background in programming and database design.  An in-depth understanding of search engine optimization is also a required skill.

I’ve talked a lot about the pitfalls and negatives associated with hiring a freelance website designer, however there are many positive aspects to going this route, if you can manage to locate a competent freelancer.

First of all, the freelancer is often home-based and has much lower overhead — no staff, no rent, etc. — and thus can offer a far lower fee for an outstanding website that’s custom-tailored to your business. A design agency might have a full staff to immediately attend to your every need and question, but their fee might be two to three times that of the freelancer. And as a small businessperson, the freelancer often has a perspective on your situation and an empathy for your needs that you don’t always receive with a larger agency.

The final decision is yours

In the end, of course, the final decision of whom you turn for the design of your website is a personal one. It is dependent on your requirements, budget, and preferences. I hope this post was informative and beneficial in helping you reach this decision.

Regardless of your decision, please keep this in mind: your website should not be treated as an afterthought. It is one of your most important marketing tools and should be handled as such. Put in the time and effort to do the required research in order to make the correct choice for your business.

The title tags are found in the XHTML documents that make up the pages of a website, and looks something like this:
<title>ABC Widgets Inc. — Home Page</title>.

The text that sits between the opening <title> tag and the closing </title> tag is not seen on the web page itself, but at the top of your screen in the browser bar. This text also appears as the wording in your browser’s “favorites” when you bookmark a website.

Typically, this wording contains the company’s name and the page that your on, such as illustrated above: ABC Widgets Inc. — Home Page, or ABC Widgets Inc. — Contact Us, and so on. This is how most websites are set up, and they’re passing up a valuable SEO opportunity.

The XHTML document contains the source code that the automated search engine software, known as bots, used to search or “crawl” websites in order to determine how they’re ranked. Because the Title tag resides near the top of this document and is the first text to appear on the web page, it’s the first element that is read by the bot as it crawls your page.

The title is considered a very important factor in determining where your site will be ranked, and it should contain valuable keywords. In fact, I recently got two of my customers from the third page to the first page of Google simply by changing a couple their title tags.

Unfortunately, most companies miss this opportunity entirely and only include their company name and the page name. This is poor SEO strategy. Do you want people to find your website because they’re typing in your company’s name? No! If someone enters your company name into a search engine, that’s a person who is already aware of your business and probably knows what you do.

What you want to happen is to have people find you who are looking for your business category — not your business name. And if your customers are primarily located in the same geographic area of your company, you’d want to use that to your advantage as well.

To use an example, if you’re an electrician and most of your business is in Lackawanna County Pennsylvania, you’d want someone to find your company by searching on something like electricians in Lackawanna County, or northeast PA electricians — and these are the types of keyphrases that you’d want to include in that Title tag, as so:

<title>electricians in Lackawanna County, northeast PA electricians</title>

Use the Title tag to your advantage and use words and phrases that individuals seeking your type of service or product — not your company name — would enter into a search engine. If you really want your company name to appear in the title bar of the browser and when your site is bookmarked, then put it last, e.g.:

<title>electricians in Lackawanna County, northeast PA electricians | XYZ Electrical Inc.</title>

The order in which the keywords/keyphrases appear is also important, so put the one you feel is most valuable first, the second most valuable second, and your company name last. Also, don’t stuff too many keywords into your title tag because the search engine gods frown upon that and may penalize you. Keep the total number of characters to sixty-five or less including spaces.

Another word of caution: always separate your keywords/phrase by commas or the | symbol (known as a pipe). If you don’t separate your keyphrases the search engine bots will read it as all one word, and it’s unlikely that someone will do a search on electricians in Lackawanna County northeast PA electricians.

I hope this gives you a bit of insight into search engine optimization. There’s quite a lot to the SEO business and the rules change frequently, but the Title tag has been and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, one of the more important factors in achieving a good search engine ranking. It’s not a very difficult element to change, although researching the right keywords and keyphrases are another matter. But we’ll leave that for another post.