Unless you are a web designer, I strongly recommend you do not design your own website.
Yes, software is fairly easily available to make it possible, but don’t let that fool you into thinking anyone can design a decent (let alone good) website. Website design is more than choosing colours and putting the content on a page with a few links to a shopping cart or a blog. Even a good eye for design may not be enough as websites have specific requirements as well as coding issues.
And doing it yourself isn’t likely to be cheaper either. It may not cost you in terms of paying an invoice, but it will take a lot hours that you can’t invoice for and a low quality result can cost you in customers.
Enough of the negatives, and on to how to manage your design (or redesign)…
This post is part of Word Constructions’ Setting up a website series
1. having a website helps more than you
2. what’s involved in setting up a website?
3. Learn about web hosting
4. Preparing your initial website content
Did you know that our eyes focus on the left margin so this is the best place to start writing?
This applies to letters and other written materials (only very old fashioned styles would have indented paragraphs for letters) but even more so to electronic materials such as emails.
Of course, the other advantage of starting paragraphs on the left margin is that it is easier to type – no formatting pages or repeatedly using the tab button! And for email systems that indent previous email messages when forwarding (a very annoying system in my opinion but that’s off the point!), having indented paragraphs would look absolutely horrible and potentially end up far to the right.
So the simple answer to how to format emails is – don’t! That is, don’t format the main text – you do need to consider a space after the greeting and between paragraphs.
Let your words be the focus of your emails, and use your words wisely!
Last week I posted that it is possible to outsource managerial roles as well as specific skill roles. But maybe you’re wondering why someone would outsource a manager so here’s my list of ideas – can you add to it?
Filling an entire website with content can be a bit daunting, especially when you are also trying to get the design and navigation settled. So the third part of our series on getting your business online is about some initial website content.
Rule number one – don’t put up a message like “under construction”.
Search engines don’t like it – and nor do humans for that matter! To me, it looks lazy as it is not much harder to put a brief message on a temporary homepage than to write those two boring words there.
Obeying rule number one, many people therefore don’t have anything showing on their site during the development phase. This seems like a waste to me – the sooner your site is up, the sooner you can send people there (i.e. you don’t have to delay all marketing while waiting) and let search engines discover it.
So my suggestion is to have an interim homepage that can go live very quickly, giving you and your designer a bit of breathing space.
Here’s what to include on that interim page…
In the last week we have seen a lot about world and local financial markets – they dropped drastically but has already picked up some of that again. Have you tried researching information about this situation, either in general or for something specific?
Knowing the date can be important for context
I was looking at various superannuation sites yesterday to see what they were telling members about their investments and was amazed that not all listed a date for the news item they had published.
One in particular started their article with “Last week was a tumultuous one for world share markets” and finished with a footnote “*SR50 Balanced fund SuperRatings Crediting Rate Survey, June 2011”.
So was it about things that happened last week (i.e. early August 2011) or some other week since June 2011?
I’m fairly confident the article went live in the last 48 hours so presumably it is about recent developments. But what if I hadn’t looked at their site until next week – would the data still be relevant or useful?
Yes, putting dates on websites can date them fast (the ‘last updated’ reference on many pages is the prime example of that) but current news items are the exception.
I have often read blog posts and wondered when it was written; “new version of ABC will be released next month” and “our web visitors doubled in the past 12 months” carry more weight when I understand ‘next month’ and ‘past 12 months’. A small note after the post is fine (WordPress does it by default and that works for me!)
People need to have a context, a reference point for the information. Especially for things like financial markets which change so rapidly at times.
And just to be clear, this is being written on 10 August 2011!
What, if any, pages on your site do you add a date to? If not all pages are the same, why do you add dates to some but not others?
Whether you write a lot and just like learning more or you feel your writing needs a lot of work, you can do many things to improve it. I was reminded of this recently by reading a blog post about the impact of Twitter on a writer.
Here are some quick ideas you may be able to use:
Writing’s main importance is in being able to communicate, to express yourself (or your business) to others effectively. You don’t have to be the world’s best writer but you can choose to improve and not be the world’s worst writer!
Not every job or business is suited to outsourcing and using contractors – for various reasons that we won’t go into right now. But what happens if no one is able to do the job in-house for a while?
Recently I did some work for a company while they were searching for a full-time technical writer. Being in the wrong city and unavailable for full-time work, I wasn’t going to apply for the job but I was able to help them while they looked for a new person for the role.
In this case, I set up some procedure templates and introductory documents (including standard emails for the team to use when sending information to the new writer), as well as editing the rough procedures the programmers had written down.
So don’t assume you can’t use outsource a project temporarily while you find the right person to work in-house – hiring an outsider can reduce a lot of the pressure to hire which can result in choosing the first possibility rather than waiting for the right person.
Even if a contractor can’t do the full job, especially if working remotely is an issue, you may find they can help with the following aspects of a role:
What else could be outsourced as an interim measure in your business?
The general answer is yes, you can outsource a managerial role but there are some exceptions and industry-specific challenges.
By outsourcing I simply mean having someone take on a managerial role as a contractor rather than an employee. Often this means they work remotely (ie not in the business premises) but that is not always the case.
For example, I do the Communications Manager role (including being listed on an org chart) for some companies who don’t need a full time person – I write their materials and manage the relevant suppliers (designers and printers mostly) from a distance.
Outsourcing a manager role may not be effective in every case of course:
So next time you are considering a full time employee manager, think about whether or not you could outsource that role effectively.
If you have outsourced a managerial role, even on a short term basis, how did it go? Woud you do it again?
A web host offers you some space (memory) on a server that is connected as part of the internet so that anything you put on that space is available over the Net. You must have a host if you want a website people can access, although you can restrict that access on some or all pages if you want.
Where to start… there are a lot of web hosts out there so limit yourself to looking at a small proportion of them and getting a short list for detailed comparisons (see list below for things to consider). Here are some tips on finding some web hosts to look at:
Some points to consider about web hosting:
For what it’s worth, I have used MultimediART for some years and had great service but some down time and lack of notices, Digital Pacific with advance notices, no downtime and good service and Jumba with no issues (and no real test of their service). All Australian and priced for value.
This post is part of Word Constructions’ Setting up a website series
1. having a website helps more than you
2. what’s involved in setting up a website?
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