Wanting A Fancy Website With All The Bells And Whistles?
There are many pitfalls hard to see by those outside the website construction industry.
Here are just three
This article only looks at three of many issues that need to be understood to avoid disappointment:
Look online at Site designers sales pitches promoting very positive and optimistic reasons for having them build you a website. Their sites can include software modules that can just about do anything. The only limiting factor is the cost and these costs can be horrendous for a large business let alone a sole trader or a hobbyist. Fancy e-commerce sites are not an option for everyone.
Most businesses need a small static website to confirm their legitimacy and if and only if website traffic increases resulting in sales from website enquires should they move forward to justify the costs of on going expenses of add-on's.
Lets Take For Example:
Harry is going out on his own as a plumber and would like a website to find work. He Googles plumber wanted and sees what kind of businesses come up in the first couple of pages. These are the businesses he will be competing against. Can Harry a forward to have a site built that comes up in the results along with the costs of buying some of the key words he typed on a weekly basis to put his site on the first two or three pages of the search results. Will Harry's website search optimisation guru accept payment only for the jobs search results converted to paid jobs? The answer would be probably not. If the answer is yes he will need to ask how much will it cost for each search resulting in work . . . It could be much more that the job is worth even for a Prince.
There are sites that will come up in Harry's search that present him with a list of local plumbers, his competitors. He could join one of them for a charge which is not that helpful even though the company running that site will have a very positive spin on the service Harry will be charged for.
Site Building And Maintenance Costs:
Site maintenance is an on going cost and sites that collect money (e-commerce)sites or use forms that collect user email addresses and site user comment input boxes are expensive to design build and maintain properly as the site software needs to be diligently kept up to date for security reasons which can be costly depending what is running on the site. There are cheaper options, popular DIY CMS's out there however if they aren't configured properly or maintained they could be hacked causing another list of problems you just don't want to know about.
Legal Awareness:
Collecting personal information from users like email addresses or users allowed to leave comments on your site can lead to serious legal consequences that could end in criminal charges against the website owner.
Site owners are now con sided 'publishers'. Not keeping personal data secure and the site been hacked or website users leaving comments that are 'nonfactual', defame, discriminate or interpreted as discriminating against an individual or group of individuals on a site could lead to a lot of grief for a site owner, forget about free speech however I'm not saying that discrimination should be tolerated in fact the opposite.
The Search Engine Battle!!!
Getting noticed on the web gets harder every year as competition comes from websites uploaded by the thousands every day. If you think paying a specialist to get you noticed in a meaningful way think again. How did Google get to be one of the biggest and wealthiest companies to ever exist? Maybe from every website owner paying them to clamber over the top of rivals to be at the top of search result? I'm sure Googles search engine and AI systems helped them on the way.
Conclusion:
The spiel about state of the art websites that will do everything and make website owners very successful sounds great and would work in a very high website traffic scenario with stable financial backing to offset site maintenance costs along with fresh content posted almost on a daily basis. State of the art sites need finance so weekly search engine optimisation keeps it ahead of their rivals in the search results. As the net mutates at an alarmingly fast rate so must a successful website. . . Keep it simple.
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