Tips from Idea15 Web Design

I have just posted one set of my guiding rules for web consultancy, Building a business case for your web site,  over at the Scottish Business Blog.  The piece has appeared on this blog before, but I have tidied it up and updated it for 2008 to reflect the rise of social media.

What I have written is still something I feel very strongly about and which every business owner should take on board.  Believe me – you do not want to be on the receiving end of the alternative.

If you are in Scotland we would love to see you on Scottish Business Forums, the companion site to the Scottish Business Blog.

I love this excerpt from Lois Frankel’s monthly coaching newsletter:

Recently, an affinity group from a large electronics firm called and asked me to make a presentation – but they had no budget. My recommendation to them was to get a budget so that their members didn’t feel like second class citizens.

Girlfriend practices what she preaches! In her life-transforming book, “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office”, she talks about how too many women in business apologise for wanting to spend money on their own professional development. They choose to regard themselves as charity cases and objects of sympathy, where male colleagues would find development money in the budget and spent it to the penny.

Hence a group of otherwise intelligent corporate women think they can guilt-trip a bestselling author into speaking to them, free of charge, about how to grow thicker skins. Clearly they’ve missed the point entirely, and none of them have actually read her book!  In business and in life, no one will respect you if you don’t respect yourself. And that means quitting the charity case act and regarding yourself as the professional that you are.

In the consultancy side of my web design business, I always advise customers that when they say they have a problem with their existing web site, 75% of the time the problem actually has nothing to do with the web site. This week a new client proved that mantra in a way that still has me shaking my head.

This lovely lady approached me after the most recent Women into Business networking event to seek help with her web site. The company which she had hired to create and run it had done a runner. They were not answering or returning calls, emails, or written letters, and their own web site had gone down. Her “contact us” form had stopped working the day they took their own web site offline, and she was losing frightening amounts of business as a result. She had never dealt with her web site directly – everything had always gone through the designer – and now, with her mail form no longer working and the site in urgent need of updating, she could neither get in to her own web site nor find the people who could. The host was not allowing her to access her own account, as it had a design company employee’s name on it, and they needed to track him down to get his permission first…which was what this poor lady had been trying to do for months…

Doo doo DOO! Idea15 to the rescue!

First, to get control of her site back, I had to track down the company that created it. A little web research told a very interesting story. The company had been based in Edinburgh, and its one named employee was an all around “sales girl”. You know the type. They breed by the dozen. I found her current whereabouts through a social networking page, which told me that she knew everything about partying and nothing about IT. Getting in touch with her would be a complete waste. The other 35+ employees, now where were they?

China.

Although they were fully registered with Companies House, they had not filed their books in over two years, and I sourced their records to locate their most recent registered address so that I could try to contact them. It was a student flat in Edinburgh rented in a Chinese man’s name. There is nothing wrong with working from home – I do it myself, of course – however, I am a sole trader, and I am very up front about what I can and cannot accomplish. This company had been selling themselves as being capable of doing everything from designing your web site to installing your telephones and network to building databases. All this from a rental student flat? Where were they storing the inventory of E3 cables, the bin room?

Normally, due diligence would have caused me to try to negotiate with him to improve the deal the client had already paid for. Normally, though, the company representative is not a front for third world labour. I may not be Chinese, but I know Sun Tzu, and Sun Tzu says that a fly-by-night gangmaster is not a worthy adversary for battle.

As for the quality of the web site his company had produced, it was shocking. Table layout, graphical navigation, no ALT/TITLE tags, a rainbow coloured stats counter on each page, no META tags, no basic SEO – it was late 1990s amateur design.

Fortunately, the client was the domain owner. The domain is the power, not the site on the host. Incredibly (or perhaps not), the designer had not worked to a written contract, only verbal assurances, which meant that the client didn’t owe them a second more of her time.

I found a new host for her, moved the site over, wrestled the domain out of the registrar where the fly-by-night had stored it and onto a new registrar, and took it live last night. It still looks like it was made in China for a bowl of rice, but it’s out of that company’s hands, and next week the client and I will sit down and discuss how to redo this web site in a way that will win her business, not sympathy.

This company was advertising web sites, outsourced to China, from £99. You can be sure that the sales girl and the man on the ground in Edinburgh took at least a 2/3rds cut from each £99. So, someone in China got paid less than £35 to make a Scottish client’s web site. Everyone loves to get on their moral high horse about the true cost of a £5 pair of jeans made in China, but when it comes to IT, people are strangely silent. Paying someone on the other side of the world just £35 to create a web site is not outsourcing. It’s exploitation. Keeping a stable of people in an eastern country to work below fair market rates does not make you an entrepreneur. It makes you a pimp.

My client’s business turned into a battle ground for the unhealthy collision between a naive startup and an exploitative parasite out to milk the system. She was unsure and afraid of all things web, and believed the first thing a smooth-talking sales girl told her. As a result, instead of growing her business and signing new customers, she’s been writing pointless letters to a dormant address. And instead of helping her expand her web presence, I spent five billable hours just trying to get a hold of it.

Lesson learned for her. I look forward to working with her to improve her web presence and to correct the bad impression of my chosen profession which the experience has unfortunately given her.

One of my web design and consultancy clients was quoted in yesterday’s Scotsman in a story about Alpha Males, those arrogant, chest-beating workplace cowboys. You know the type: the ones who treat the business as their own private boys’ club and don’t think twice about ruining the lives of anyone who gets in the way of their fun.

Both Julia and I had encountered our share of them, and we both have those experiences to thank for inspiring us to create our own businesses built on integrity and dedication, not bluster and abuse.

Read what Julia has to say here and give her a buzz if you are looking to develop your managerial or leadership skills. She is an amazing lady!

The Scotsman carries a piece about the legal issues involved when a company changes hands and its web site becomes one of the transferred assets.  This piece was written by a lawyer for a managerial audience, so it’s not a light read.

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/When-websites-are-forgotten.3692223.jp

One could say that the Scotsman’s web site was forgotten in its recent horrendous revamp, but let’s not go there.