Spero Consulting

Archive for May 12th, 2009

Yes­ter­day, May 11, The Wall Street Jour­nal included a spe­cial sec­tion, The Jour­nal Report, for small busi­ness. The front page arti­cle for that sec­tion was Start­ing Over – As an Entre­pre­neur.

That arti­cle, which dis­cussed laid-​off work­ers start­ing their own businesses, reminded us of one of our posts from early Feb­ru­ary: Free Agency and the Vir­tual Econ­omy. If you’re a small-​business owner, an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, or an employee-​entrepreneur in charge of small divi­sion or a geo­graph­i­cal region, we strongly encour­age you to read that entry. Among other things, it describes the sim­plic­ity and rel­a­tive low cost of build­ing a sub­stan­tial, content-​managed, web presence.

We’ll try not to repeat what we wrote three months ago, but in this post, we do want to men­tion a com­mon fal­lacy or error that we’ve observed folks make with their web mar­ket­ing efforts. They are far too con­cerned about the design of their sites rather than the func­tion­al­ity, and that over-​emphasis of form is self-​destructive to their (often sub­stan­tial) efforts of estab­lish­ing a business.

Mod­ern sites should have three dis­tinct com­po­nents: the design tem­plate, the infra­struc­ture, and the content.

Older sites, built in html, mix the three, while newer tech­nolo­gies sep­a­rate the three func­tions and allow non-​technical indi­vid­u­als to con­cen­trate on (1) adding and edit­ing what they know best – the con­tent, which should illus­trate their exper­tise (or their prod­ucts’ com­pet­i­tive advan­tages), and (2) attract­ing and track­ing vis­i­tors, which is cru­cial to know­ing your web audi­ence and gaug­ing whether it is the one that you want.

Once devel­oped, the tem­plate and the infra­struc­ture remain rather sta­tic, but (1) the con­tent can be expanded, improved, and refined by the site’s owner with a lap­top and an Inter­net con­nec­tion while he or she is watch­ing tele­vi­sion or wait­ing to board an air­plane or when­ever, and (2) with a prop­erly devel­oped site, one can deter­mine how one is attract­ing vis­i­tors and can deter­mine what those vis­i­tors find use­ful (or, at a min­i­mum) worth read­ing on the site.

The main, ini­tial error that many folks com­mit is their over-​emphasis on the design – locat­ing just the “per­fect” tem­plate – par­tic­u­larly with respect to the home page.

Unless vis­i­tors already know about the site, they’re unlikely to arrive at the home page from a search engine. So, while mak­ing a good design impres­sion is impor­tant, it’s far less impor­tant than a novice might think. That means that unless the site is designed for func­tion­al­ity, includ­ing search engine opti­miza­tion, the bud­ding entre­pre­neur may have a beau­ti­ful home­page that no one ever visits.

New entre­pre­neurs and con­sul­tants should know that vis­i­tors ares much more likely to arrive on another page via a search of par­tic­u­lar words that the vis­i­tor finds inter­est­ing. That’s why con­tent mat­ters, includ­ing the intel­li­gent design of tags/​keywords, which are syn­onyms for your most impor­tant ideas and descrip­tions. Vis­i­tors will visit the home page IF (and that’s a big “if”) IF they find some­thing use­ful at your site. That means your site needs to help (or hint at the capa­bil­ity) to solve their prob­lems. Oth­er­wise, to put it bluntly, nobody cares about you.

If you’re recently laid-​off or have recently decided to start your own busi­ness, a cheap, effec­tive way to get atten­tion is through a well-​designed web site. Just remem­ber that the design (and devel­op­ment) go far beyond the look of the home page. Besides our other capa­bil­i­ties, we spe­cial­ize in devel­op­ing just such sites.

For more infor­ma­tion on our capa­bil­i­ties, use our con­tact form to request the pass­word to our Web Design and MIS Ser­vices page or our design cen­ter.