7 Things to Think about when Building a Website

VO: Get ready for your semi-regular dose of random ideas from the guys at Codelation. We like to talk about big ideas companies that are winning, and those that aren't along with current events in our crazy world of software startups. So come along with Eric and Josh, who challenged you to think big, start small and turn your ideas into something on this episode of, from idea to done.

Josh: Hi, I'm Josh.

Erick: and I'm Erick. And on today's episode, we're going to talk about the seven things you need to know when building a website.

Josh: There's a lot of people that, that do website design and development, and there's also a lot of different types of websites that people need. And we want to make sure that you understand some of the differences and really seven things that, that go into, um, things that we we'd recommend that you take a look at when, when building your next website, a website for a chiropractor or a coffee shop is going to be different than a sales based website, where you're trying to get people to sign up for your, your SAS product or service. And that leads us really into the first thing of, you know, what is the goal of your site,

Speaker 3: Right? And as a salesperson, you can't sell the wrong product to somebody. And so we really at a talk about the goal of your overall site, because if you have a really nice expensive website that doesn't do what you want, that does nothing for your business. And so one of the things that we like to kind of look at and, and balance is like, what do you think the difference between having a marketer on your team, do it in house, getting an agency to do it, or having a freelance person handle your website.

Josh: Yeah. And so there's, you know, the, the second item is, you know, who, who does it, uh, there's no right or wrong. Who's going to build the site for you. Um, but you want to look at the opportunity cost to where if your internal marketing department is, is billable, and you have to take someone away from billable activities to build your website, is that the right place for them to be? So, uh, you know, a freelancer would be a cheaper option and agency's going to have more bells and whistles, uh, but also comes with a higher price tag. So, you know, just keep in mind how expensive it could be and what you're looking for and make sure that, you know, it's aligning with your goals at the end of the day, um, don't get sold something that you're, you're not believing in, or, or don't see the value.

Speaker 3: And that even kind of brings into who's going to be doing the content for you. And that should be an important part of your decision-making process because an agency is going to help you a lot with your content and you're going to pay for it. And your marketing team might be able to have that to where you can just hire a freelancer to make all of your moving pieces in your message, kind of role with your messaging that you technically wouldn't know how to kind of do that.

Josh: And that's the biggest piece that you can play if you're not going to do a website in house is providing the content. Um, I recommend that people start with the concept of you've got a very small white board and a very big, uh, dry marker to our start with broad strokes of the content, kind of the bullet points, and then flush it out from there. If you end up going the other direction, you have the website built, then you try to add content. You're going to try to cram information the wrong direction and write to fit the space that it has.

Speaker 3: And, and when you finished your site and your content and everything, and it's all done. One of the things that a lot of people don't really think about is what's going to, what's it going to cost to keep this going? And do you need some extra support with that moving forward?

Josh: Yep. I'd always recommend for people to find it, you know, if it's going to be an outside vendor or even your internal team to try to say, you know, if we had to have somebody take two hours a week to update, this is the external team that I'm looking for, have the capabilities to do that. Do they want to be doing that? These are all questions they should be asking on the front end, but, you know, it's that ongoing support that can get really costly if you're locked into the support contract, but it can also be really nice to have somebody there that's ready to, you know, knock out those little tasks when you need them to.

Speaker 3: Right. And, and even when we kind of have someone at the back end, like you talked about you, it's, it's a really important aspect of a website to be aware that how your site is getting backed up and what happens if something goes wrong.

Josh: Yup. We, we see a lot of a WordPress website builds a WordPress as a content management system. Um, the downside to it is it's, there's a lot of hackers out there looking into, um, take advantage of, uh, known, uh, kind of security holes within WordPress. And we see that it's a easy place for a hack to happen. Um, so what does happen when you get hacked? Can you get it back up and going, do you need to talk to your hosting company? Um, if, if your site gets seen as, um, as being infected on Google, it's going to have a, uh, a bold message underneath your website and your search results. Are people going to shop there anymore? You know, it it's, it's a security. Yeah.

Speaker 3: And you see it when it happens the target, but it's very devastating to small businesses and that doesn't make the news. And so knowing how to deal with the problem is an important thing that you really should think about even at step one. And that kind of gets into the last part of it, where we talk about hosting and ownership, like where is the site going to be hosted? How do you deal with that? And do you own that site if somebody else makes it?

Josh: Yeah, I've, I've had a lot of people ask me, you know, where is my site hosted? Who owns this? What's the domain. There's so many questions that go into it. And you should know who owns what, where it's hosted, what the email provider is. And you should have access to all of those things, because if you're paying a company to come in and host your website for you, and they go out of business, where, where is your website? You're, you're kinda kind of up a Creek,

Speaker 3: Unless you talk to some of us who can kind of reverse engineer where the site's going for, just to know and be able to get that back.

Josh: So those are really seven tips that we'd recommend for you to look at, uh, when developing a new website. This is the same, whether this is a sales website, informational website, or you're building a website for your new SAS product. Right.

Speaker 3: So anybody know what SAS is out there? No, Josh

Josh: We'll cover that in another episode. There we go. We got another topic. Yeah. All right. Well, that's all for this episode. We look forward to talking to you next time. Perfect.