In this episode of the Clickable Marketing podcast, I look at choosing the right designer and how to work with them, difference website CMS platforms like WordPress and choosing the right theme to make your website work for you.
Podcast Transcription:
CHOOSING WEBSITE DESIGNERS, PLATFORMS & THEMES
You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck.
Good day, and welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode 3. In this episode, we’re going to have a look at finding a good web designer, choosing a platform, and choosing a theme.
FINDING A GOOD WEB DESIGNER – GET TO KNOW THEM WELL
One of the most important things about launching a small business website or just rebuilding your existing one is finding a great designer that you can work with. There’s a lot of difference between designers. Some designers are very, very good at coming up with original designs that will support what you’re trying to achieve, and others are better at copying what other people have done before. You need to find the one that suits you.
I’m often asked what a fair price is for a website. I’ve got to say, within Australian market, $3,000 is a fair starting price for a website. If you’re paying over $10,000 for a small business website, to be honest with you, you’re probably paying for their office, not necessarily their design skills. That’s too high unless you’re after really specific custom things, or you’re heading down the path of shopping carts. Things like that certainly make a difference to the price.
If you’re looking to build a website for around $1,000, chances are you’re going to get a relatively inexperienced web designer or someone who isn’t really capable of doing the high level of work that you might want to do. That might seem unfair, but that’s based on my experience.
More often than not, when you pay for a designer who is charging around $1,000, they really have a hard time finding enough clients to keep their business open. If you’re selling a website for a thousand dollars, it’s really plain economics. If you need to make $50,000 a year, you need to sell at least 50 websites. That’s a lot of websites to complete in one year. Most designers who understand the metrics of their business and want to provide a good quality service will charge around $3,000 or more to get the website done. If the website is being done for $1,000, more often than not, it’s being outsourced to an overseas designer, and they are just managing the project. That’s really the only way you can keep the cost down.
When choosing a designer, choose one that you can work with. If you’re thinking of outsourcing the designer of your website overseas, and this is your first website, in other words, you really have not been on this path before; then I’d say to you, “Don’t do it.” It is really dangerous because you don’t know all of the pitfalls that you can fall into. The other thing is that it makes it difficult down the track when you want to make changes. If this is your first website, I would suggest going with a local company that you can trust, that you can walk in their office, and you can talk to them. Once you’ve done it once or twice, then yes, go ahead and outsource. It’s a great way to get a website built, but work with someone that you can actually meet with face-to-face and get to know well.
When you’re choosing your website designer, make sure that you review their work. Go and look at what it is that they’ve already done. Go and talk to people who they’ve worked with. These days, everyone talks about the fact that all we know – interested in reviews, and we read all these stuff. No one ever takes the time to actually go and call someone who’s used them before.
If you’re going to take a referral for a web designer, take it with a grain of salt. It depends who’s referring them. Often, people in small business will talk to their accountant about things that they need. What an accountant sees as a good website is vastly different to what someone who is a personal trainer would call a good website. They might be looking for something that is very functional, and you might be looking for something that’s really flashy.
Again – yes it’s good to get referrals – but make sure to go and meet with the designers. Do your research. Get to know a bit about them. Go and have play with some of the sites they’ve already developed; and then when you’re satisfied that that person does meet some of your needs, make an appointment and go and sit down with them for an hour and get to know them, and talk about what it is you’re trying to achieve.
MAINTAINING A WEBSITE – HAVE SOMEONE TO BACK YOU UP
There are a couple of other things you need to think about too. When you launch your website… That’s often the easiest part of having a website. Getting the maintenance done on a website can often be the hard part.
Once the website is live, people try and contact their web designer. It’s like they’ve fallen off the face off the earth. Often, they’re just impossible. They don’t take your call. They don’t answer your emails. They don’t get you on Facebook. Suddenly, the person that was your best friend a month ago will not talk to you. There are numerous reasons for that.
Often, web designers make their money from launching new websites. They don’t make if off the back end. You need to find out if your web designer does provide maintenance packages and if they can help you.
If they don’t, there are some third party services available. If you’ve got a WordPress site for example, there’s companies like WPcurve.com, who will provide the back-up service that you’re after at a set fee per month. You can have unlimited changes for a flat rate per month. There is a range of these different services for different platforms. Do your research, and make sure that you have someone to back you up.
WORKING WITH YOUR WEB DESIGNER – PLAY AND PAY FAIR
When you’re working on websites, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that you need to take the time frames that you’re given and multiply them by three. If a web designer says it’s going to take a day, it’ll take three days. If it’s going to take a week, it’ll take three weeks. If it’s going to take a month, it’ll take three months. This is a pretty good rule of thumb.
Remember, I’ve been working around web designers since about ’96 when people first started going online, and no matter what they say, the projects always blow out. The reason for that is a whole lot of things. The first one is that information is moving back and forth. They may complete a page; they then send it to you. You get it on Friday night. You don’t look at it ‘til Monday morning; then you get back to them and say, “No, I want to change this.” It goes back and forth. Every time it moves between you and them, while they ask for some information, there is always a delay of a couple of days at least. They ask for photos or they ask for content. It takes you time to find that stuff and send it over. Every time this happens, it blows the project down further.
I know from talking to web designers, this is really an issue for them. You say you’ve got the information ready; then they ask for it. Actually, in fact, it’s not ready. It’s just inside your head. Make sure, before you start the project, that you get the majority of information that you want to use, and the photos, and the videos, and all those sorts of things ready before you start the project. Because every time that they ask for information, it will push the end date back and your launch will be further and further away.
Honestly, the biggest problem with this is that most times you, as the business owner, blame the web designer. Yet, when I review some of these projects for people, I actually find out that it’s really their fault, and they’re putting the blame where it shouldn’t be. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when designers lose the plot, and the get off-task and all sorts of things happen; but more often than not, it’s actually the small business owner that causes the problems.
One of the major issues I see is where you lay out a scope for the project, and then halfway through you, as the website owner, decide, “Well I’d like to add an extra page,” or, “See, I’d really like to put these up there,” or, “I don’t like that photo. Can I change that photo?” What happens is, not only do you frustrate your web designer, but you actually cause changes which then expands the scope of the project.
From a web designer’s point of view, there are two things. One, it takes extra time; so they feel that they should charge you, but in some ways they have agreed to a project. It creates a bit of a tension between you and your web designer. Now, they’re willing to stretch a little bit as long as you are too, but don’t push your luck. If you push your scope, if you make changes, please pay your web designers. They work hard. They work long hours to meet ends, just like you do, and they deserve to be paid for their work.
MAKING CHANGES TO YOUR WEBSITE – SERVICES AVAILABLE
Having seen hundreds of websites made over the years, one of the things I have learned is most web designers make their money on selling new websites. The majority of their income comes from the sale of the new website. What happens once the website is launched is it’s quite often like that they’ve fallen off the edge of the earth. You can no longer find them. They don’t return your calls, and it’s very, very frustrating.
You have a couple of options available to you there, depending on what platform you’re using for your website. Some web designers offer a payment plan where you pay a certain amount per month for service. If you want something done, you just load it into a queue, and it feeds into their system; and as they get to it, they do it. That’s covered in the amount you pay per month.
Not all do that. There is a range of other options available to you. One of the first things is that if you use WordPress for example, there are companies like WPcurve.com, where you pay a monthly fee, and all you do is submit your changes to them, and they guarantee to make those changes for you. It’s just like having a back-up team there. You don’t need your web designer for all the changes. They can do all that for you.
There is a range of different services like that. It’s worth looking around, because there’s a whole pile of things that often don’t get set up or are set up and aren’t set up properly when a website launches.
For example, you might want to add Google Analytics, or you might to add tracking of some sort like a Facebook Pixel, or you might need to get back-ups done of the website so that you have regular back-up in case the website crashes, which does happen more often than you’d like to think.
Often when a website is launched for the first time, all these things are installed, but they’re not necessarily working as expected, and little changes need to be made. That’s where having a third party who looks after the maintenance of the website is really, really handy. It’s worth digging around on the web and having a look at those services, but some web design companies actually offer those services built in-house. That’s always the best way to go. If you do try them, and it is working out, keep going. If it isn’t, then dig around and find someone who will do the job.
Often, the changes that people need done, and I must say form what I’ve seen, are things that a high school student could do. Have a look around and see if there’s a local high school student that could do the job for you. It may be there are people out there looking for the work. In your case, you may have a teenager sitting at home who can actually do it for you, such as resizing images and putting them on the website. They’re born to do this stuff. For them it’s natural. It’s what they’ve done since they’re brought onto this earth. Find a teenager. You can save a lot of money. Give someone a job, and get all your work done very, very easily.
LEARNING TO EDIT – DO IT YOURSELF
My personal advice to you is that you should learn how to do basic editing yourself though. It’s all very well to give up control to someone else, but often there are little changes you want to do. It might be late at night, or it’s on a weekend. For example, you’ve taken some photos of a new job, and you’ve got before and after; and they need to go up on the website with a little description of the project. That’s not a hard thing to do. Most people could do that in Microsoft Word. How come they can’t do it on the web? The fact of the matter is they’ve just never taken the time to learn, and no one’s showing them.
It’s not particularly difficult to make changes to images. I’ll do another podcast on this one day. One of my favourite tools to use is Photoshop, but Photoshop is quite expensive. There’s a range of free options.
For example on Mac, built-in to the Mac is a program called Preview. If you open up a photo on Preview and go up to the top, there is an option there to change the size. You can change the size of the photo and save it in the new small size. For example, in most websites you’d have a photo around 640×480. Any bigger than that, and they start to get a bit large unless you compress them. You can do that very, very easily using the Preview tool.
Another one that’s online that I’d like to encourage my clients to use is Pixlr.com. It’s free, and again, you can load a photo up very easily over the web; and there is an app as well for this. Just resize it, and save it. You can take both your photos, size them to the same size, and then learn how to put them in. It really doesn’t take that long, and if you do a search online, you’ll often find free tutorials on YouTube; or you can go into a one day course on how to edit your website.
I really do think that it’s an absolutely essential skill. You should have it. It’s not that hard. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can certainly use the web. It is really that simple these days. It used to be very difficult, I’ll agree. You had to know HTML, and PHP, and all sorts of things. Now we kind of passed that era with their content management systems. They’re very powerful, and we’re trying to make them more easy to use all of the time.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM – CONTROLLING YOUR WEBSITE
I’ve the using the term CMS, Content Management System. Realistically, all of this is a piece of software that loads on a web server that allows you to control your website yourself. There’s a range of these. Some of the more popular ones that you might have heard of are WordPress, Joomla. There’s a whole pile of them.
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available – 78 million sites built on this software. It’s completely free for the software. What costs the money is the cost of getting a theme and having it customized to meet your needs. A lot of people would say, “How come I got to pay?” Well, the software is the free bit. It’s all the work to make it look right, to make it look pretty that costs you the money because it takes time to do that sort of thing.
A couple of different options when we’re talking about CMS is first of all is self-hosted solution, and that’s like WordPress. You pay to have a web server at somewhere like Netregistry, or HostGator, or someone like that, and you load WordPress on there, and then you put a theme on the top. That’s self-hosted. You’re paying for the hosting. It’s all there for yourself.
The second option is a hosted solution. These are sites like Weebly and Wix. They’re getting very, very good, and I must say for the price… well and truly worth checking out if you’re starting out with a new website, or you’re thinking about setting up just a small secondary website. For $5 a month sometimes, you can have a really well-designed, really nice website that you can edit yourself. Yes, you’ll have to either pay someone to load your photos up and put the content in, or you can do it yourself. Again, if you can use Microsoft Word, you should be able to use Wix and Weebly. That’s pretty straight forward if you sit there and spend an hour just fiddling around with them.
One of the great things is that you can actually see the design before it’s released because you choose a layout, and then you drop your photos, etc., into it.
That’s a hosted solution. We got self-hosted and hosted.
There’s a third category that I talk about, and that’s the designer’s own content management system. Some web developers have actually written their own CMS. Sometimes these are edited version of, say, like Joomla or WordPress. They don’t look like WordPress or Joomla anymore, and they’ve had all sorts of modules out to them all, things like that. They’re owned by the company that you get to develop your website.
There are a few problems with this. Some of them are positive. Some of them are bad, I suppose. One of the positive is that they can add a lot of functionality to the website, and as they add new plug-ins, new features, you’re given those as well. Suddenly, if they add a plug-in to integrate MailChimp, then suddenly you have the ability to integrated MailChimp to handle your mass emailing.
The other problem is that if you want to move your website to somewhere else, you can’t move. It’s that simple. More often than not, their platform is on their hosting, and you can’t move your website. That means that if you choose to try and go to a new designer, you pretty well lose everything you’ve got. Obviously, you can get screen shots, and you can copy the information and things like that; but in the end, unless you have the CMS, it’s not going to look the same – pluses and minuses of every system.
The final category is a special category, I suppose. In the end, there are hosted solutions, and these are big platforms. An example of this is Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst started out as a small company. They grew very quickly, and it’s been bought out by Adobe. Adobe now supplies that content management system. It’s extremely powerful. It has a lot of tools and abilities built into it. It’s far more powerful than most system that you would ever come across.
And look, it is fantastic to use. But again, it is a hosted solution. It’s owned by Adobe, so you’re basically paying a monthly fee to have your website sit on there. Just like you would with another web server, but the cost is higher. Where you might be paying HostGator $10 a month or $20 a month, you’ll be paying $100 or $200 or whatever, depending on what features you’ve got turned on.
CHOOSING A PLATFORM – ONE THAT FITS YOUR NEEDS
So we’ve got self-hosted like WordPress. We’ve got hosted like Wix and Weebly. We’ve got designers’ own CMSs. Then we got major platforms like Adobe Business Catalyst. What you use will be between you and your designer. This can alter who you choose. Obviously, if you want to use WordPress because you’ve heard good things about it, and look I use WordPress for a lot of my sites; then you’re going to need to find a designer who can work with WordPress. Yes, there are specialists who do that.
Alternatively, if you’re happy to go with any solution as long as it fits your need, then other designers might be able to help you. It’s really up to you.
Every business owner I’ve ever talked to has different opinions about this. Some want complete control. In other words, if I want to move from this hosting to that hosting because I get tired of dealing with that person, I want to be able to pick up my website and move it over there. If that’s the case, then WordPress is the option for you. If you want something that’s quick and easy and that you can put together yourself without a great deal of trouble, then start out with a hosted solution like Weebly or Wix. They work really well, and yes, they do rank fine in the search engines.
If you’re looking for something more in-depth, well then you may want to look at a major platform. Obviously, shopping carts are completely different, but WordPress has plug-in so that it allows you to put a shopping cart on there. You can use osCommerce for example, which is probably the most… Sorry, not osCommerce, WooCommerce, which is one of the most popular plug-ins for doing WordPress sites and turning them into shopping carts.
I think the key thing to think about here is that there is no right answer to this. What you choose today, in two years’ time, may drive you nuts. But that’s the way it is, okay? Go with what fits your needs now. Think about it as a two-year project, so in two years, you’ll look at it and review it.
WORKING OUT THE BUDGET – IT MAY BE PAYING FOR ITSELF
Work out your budget. If you’re going for a hosted solution, it’s $100 a month. That’s $1200 a year. It’s going to cost you $2400 over two years. If the website makes you $20,000, then it’s more than paid for itself.
Look at the long-term advantage of having the right website and having it designed the way you want it you before you look at the short-term costs. People often look at just the bill that’s in front of them, and they forget that website sitting out there, selling you day and night, whether you’re awake, whether you’re asleep, whether your business is open, whether your business is closed. The website is still there doing its job. Look at the long-term gain for the short-term pain.
PLUG-INS – FUNCTIONALITY
Personally, I go with WordPress. I like the ability. I like the idea of the plug-ins. If you haven’t heard much about plug-ins, basically, they’re a way of adding additional function to a website. If I want to add pop-up boxes, then I can get a plug-in for that that will allow me to do that. If I want to add forms, then there’s a plug-in that’ll allow me to do that. If I want to add the ability for people to book their own time to talk with me, then there’s a plug-in for that.
Also, what you will find is there’s a range of other services that will actually integrate into your existing website. You’ve got to see what plug-ins they’ve got. If you wanted to work with lead pages, for example, for making landing pages, there’s a plug-in for WordPress. I believe there’s plug-ins for other platforms as well. In other words, you can put the plug-in in, which will allow you to link your lead pages directly into your website.
If you’re look for that sort of functionality, make sure you do your research up front. One of the common problems I’ve seen when people go and do things like a shopping cart on their website is they run into issues with shipping and payment gateways. If you’re banking with Citibank, and your payment gateway only works with authorize.net, then that plug-in is not going to be any use to you. That shopping cart is not going to work for you. You’re going to have to set up secondary accounts or third accounts in some cases, and then they never seem to work exactly as you want them to. You might want to ship a product by weight only, and the shipping cart only does it by size. All these things have to be examined when you’re deciding on a platform that you’re going to use to build your website.
Definitely going into e-commerce to sell products, that is a whole another episode. I’ll actually spend another episode on it because it’s just so far in-depth. What we’re looking at here today, really, is just your normal, average, everyday business website that we use to promote our goods and services.
CHOOSING A THEME – THE LOOK THAT YOU LIKE
Once you’ve chosen a platform, what you need to do is come up with the look or the theme that is what you want your website to look like. With WordPress, for example, there is a range of predesigned themes. Why would you want to go with a predesigned theme? In my opinion, it gives you an idea of what the website’s going to look like before it goes live. In other words, you’re going to see your website even though it doesn’t have your images in it. You’re going to see how the website is going to look when people come to it. It gives you kind of an image of what you’re going to be seeing, what you’re going to be owning before you actually get the website built.
If you’re the other way around where people… You have a designer designing a custom site from scratch. What often happens is they build the site, and then when you start to use it, you find out all these things that you assumed about the site that aren’t actually there; whereas, at least if you choose a theme, you can normally test them. They have demo versions. You can click on the menus. You can click on the buttons. You can fill out the forms. You can do everything and make sure it is exactly what you want. My suggestion to you is you do look at using a platform that allows you to have themes. Hosted ones like Weebly and Wix already have the themes designed, and WordPress has millions of themes available.
THEMES AND CMS – MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE
If you’re getting on the path of having a custom-designed theme done, you are putting yourself on the path to a world of hurt. That might sound a bit strong, but honestly, you are. Because the minute you want to change anything in customized themes, you run into problems. You want to update the software that runs the CMS, suddenly it causes problems in the theme because the theme wasn’t written for that new version of the software.
A great example is working on a site the other day, and in the back end, I put in some bullet points, and the bullet points were nicely indented and everything, and when I saved it and went back the live page, there are no bullet points. The three things I listed were there, but they’re not bullet-pointed, and they’re not indented because the custom theme has damaged the basic ability of doing bullet points. Believe me. That is a basic ability. All websites should be able to do bullet points. They shouldn’t be just stopped or turned off, but it’s the customized theme that actually causes the problem, not the software. That was a WordPress site. It was the theme on top of the WordPress site that was causing the problem.
Custom themes are dangerous. You want to choose something that is like you wanted to look to start with that has back-up service and that allows you to play with it and makes sure that it’s what you want before you go there.
The biggest issue is not when it goes live. It’s 12 months down the track when the software gets updated. because there are security holes in the platform, suddenly, your WordPress theme won’t work with your new version of WordPress, or Joomla, or whatever it is. Obviously, you’re not going to have that problem when you’re working with a designer’s own CMS because they’re going to update everything, but you never really know what’s going to happen.
PRE-DESIGNED THEMES – THEME FOREST
There’s a range of different places you get themes from. One of the most popular these days is called Theme Forest. Theme Forest, you can go there, and people sell pre-designed themes for all different platforms. You can play with them in demo form, and they’re very well-priced. You might find a theme. To buy it from Theme Forest, it might $58.
One of the assumptions people say, “Well, okay, WordPress is free, and the theme is $58. Why am I paying $3,000 for a website?” The fact of the matter is the theme doesn’t work just by loading it up. Your pictures are going to be put in. Everything has to be moved around. Nothing ever works out of the box exactly as it looks online. We’d love to think it did, but it doesn’t. There’s always a learning curve involved, especially if you’re choosing a theme, and the next person chooses a different theme.
The learning curve for the designer, they’re learning as they’re going. It takes time to understand the theme, make the changes, and make them work the way that you want them to work.
Theme Forest is a great place to go, and it gives you ideas as well. You can search for sites for motor cars, or sites boat owners, or whatever. You can look at some designs. From my point of view, it allows me to see what options are available, to see what designers are thinking, and to come up with something that fits my needs.
WEBSITE “FRANKENSTEIN-ING”
One of my favourite tricks, and one that I do suggest to people who are getting a website done, is to do a Frankenstein of the website. What I’ll do is I’ll go to a range of different websites and say, “Oh, I like that heading.” I’ll print that out, and I’ll cut it out. I’ll go, “Oh, I like form.” I’ll print it out, and I’ll cut that out. I’ll get all those pieces, and I stick them together on a piece of paper.
Basically, it’s a Frankenstein of the website. I take the form from this place, and I take the photo from that, and I take the slider form there, and I take the menu from there, and I put them all together. I can take them to the designer and say, “Look, this is kind of what I want it to look like.” The designer can then work from there and come back to you with something a little bit more pretty and a little bit more functional. I call it Frankensteining; call it what you like. It does give them a visual reference point to start with.
THEME SETS – THRIVE THEMES
When you’re looking at themes, you’ll also find that there is some places who sell sets of themes, a company that provides a set of themes that you can either buy one-off or where you can buy access to.
My favourite company that provides themes for WordPress is a company called Thrive Themes. If you want to see them, just go to mrwebmarketing.com/thrive. These themes are really, really fast. They’re really clean. They have a really great editor, so you can actually go live on the page, and click on the page, and make edits to your page. You can drag and drop buttons, and they have all sorts of other additional, very powerful tools for doing landing pages and things like that.
Everybody has their favourites, so if Thrive is not for you, that’s fine. Look around, but I highly recommend them. They really are good themes.
UPDATING THE THEME – ISSUES
One of the key things that I’ve found over the last few years is, as in the case of WordPress, the CMS, the free software at the back end gets updated. The theme goes out of date. The theme designer may make changes, or they may update the theme so the theme gets better.
Updating the theme on your website is an extremely dangerous step to take because sometimes it’s a case of pressing a button, and other times it means you’ve actually got to upload the new theme. It can actually destroy the whole layout of the site. My advice to you is never ever attempt to update a theme. Always get your host or web-design company to do that sort of thing.
One of the cool things about Thrive Themes is they’ve actually set it up so you can just click a button and the change would go live on your website, and it won’t damage your theme. That’s because they control the whole aspect of the theme on your WordPress site. Most companies don’t do that, so you end up wrecking your site.
Be very careful whenever you do updates. You can cause major, major issues with your website. In fact, you can literally kill your website. You have to roll back to a new version, and if you don’t have a back-up, that’s going to be a major, major problem.
A SUMMARY – DESIGNERS, PLATFORMS & THEMES
In this podcast, we’ve looked at a few things, in fact, quite a few things. The first is that you need to find a good designer, one that you can work with. You need to take the time to get to know them. Find out whether they’re the sort of person you can work with, whether they’re going to follow you up, give you the back-up service that you’re after.
Second is you need to choose a platform. Sometimes that might be chosen for you; other times, you might want to go with a particular platform like WordPress, or Wix, or Weebly, or Business Catalyst.
The third is choosing your theme. I suggest you find a theme that you can demo and play with before it goes live. Just seeing a nice picture is not the same as having the functionality to actually play with and test. It’s well and truly worth your time to do these things.
Do your research before you go out and spend your money, because it’ll save you money in the long run.
That’s it for this episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve covered today. I hope you’ve learned a few things and maybe a few pointers that can save you a bit of money.
If you want any more information, or you want to contact me with questions or an idea, you can get me at brad@mrwebmarketing.com, or you can catch me on Facebook or Twitter.
I look forward to seeing you or talking to you in the next episode.