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It can be tough for small companies to figure out how to get onto the web. Peter Faulkner, who first got his company online in the late 1990s, explains his trial and error approach – and why he’s still not convinced by Facebook or Twitter.
THE WHOLE NOTION of the Internet has appealed to me since the late 1990s and in my own business we responded by having our first website built at the time.
It cost a bomb and to be honest, did not do much for our business other than add some cred to our image, and give us a domain name on which to hang our email addresses. I could see the potential, especially for smaller companies to play and get exposures on this global platform. The purveyors of the black art made fortunes, as is always the case when the buyer knows little and the vendor has all the knowledge.
Since the downturn, our business has had to turn to multitasking. We can no longer afford to have an in-house IT specialist so we outsource and our marketing function has been combined into Sales. Our web presence was looked after over the years by a combination of these two functions but once they moved on amicably to progress their careers elsewhere, our sites became moribund. Websites must be dynamic, not static, to stay relevant.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I decided to take on the role myself of looking after our corporate good intentions; the things that my hard working colleagues would get around to once they had looked after their real work. They were delighted: it gave me something to occupy myself and would keep me too busy to interfere with their good running of the day-to-day business. One of the tasks that I decided to take on was to sort our web presence. At the time I figured it would take a couple of weeks and I would have it knocked into shape. God bless my innocence!
Remember those overpriced merchants of doom, the Y2K guru consultants? Well, they may be long gone but the purveyors of other black arts still abound. The web is their hunting ground and those innocents who need to have their businesses online are their fodder. There is still plenty of low hanging fruit, ripe for the picking.
I was soon lost in a jungle of assorted hat colours, SEO, Joomla. WordPress, ftp, MX records, CMS, IP addresses, SMTP, hosties, toasties and whatever other acronym you are having yourself. I knew that if I did not get myself some education on the topic, I was going to get torched. I am an engineer by education, so when all else fails, RTFM, (read the effing manual).
I bought some simple books, read up online by topic, and even went to a great seminar run by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown CEB and presented by experts from the Irish Internet Association.
By now I reckoned that I had enough knowledge to be able to draw up a specific list of the work I wanted done and I had decided on a budget. Clearly I would never have the skills or the time to do it myself so I decided to advertise for a well qualified freelancer to take on the execution of my master plan. In the ad, I sought a CV and links to examples of their work together with an outline of their fee ideas.
I got a ton of replies from the most amazingly well qualified, diploma-d, degree-d and mastered young people, introducing me to a new host of double Dutch acronyms and names. I could not have failed but to be impressed having mined such a wealth of talent. When I clicked the links to the examples of their work, it appeared to me that the more they were qualified, the less I liked their output. A lot of the sites were not what I would accept and some of the payment expectations seemed rather fanciful to me.
I kept thinking that I was missing something in all of this, and thought it was best to leave it alone until I could see a way forward. At the time I was looking for a contact number for a painter chap on Google when his name popped up on a web designer’s list of clients. I went to the designer’s site to get a link, and boom: there was a page of really nice looking examples of websites he had done. I actually knew him quite well, but I had thought he was a graphic designer – and as it turns out, he is.
That was when the penny dropped. First you need design and then you need the technical ability. One is a gift and the other a learned skill. The other people I had been looking at only had the technical part, and it showed in their work. My new man has both. Within three weeks we have six new micro sites and one completely new site up and running.
There is a third element that is equally important and rather obvious really. There is no point in having great design and functionality if the content is weak. It is unrealistic to expect any outsider to know your business, products or markets. Content is king and you just have to do the work yourself. I spent a huge amount of time writing the content, preparing PDF specification sheets, arranging photographs and captioning them properly.
I then gave all my output to a colleague to proof read, edit and enhance. We worked up a new list of key words and phrases to suit each area of our business to ensure we had the most effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). There is no point in having sites that do not get found by the search engines and achieve decent search result page rankings.
We had set up over a dozen websites when I discovered to my horror that we were paying multiple hosting fees to a variety of our past website designers and hosting companies. The total was well over €1000 per annum. Instead, we set up new multiple domain hosting facility capable of hosting 50 individual sites for less than a tenth of the annual cost and consolidated all our hosting on one account.
Not all the transfers went smoothly but we were lucky that we received good cooperation from people we had worked with in the past. We also had some issues with certain bespoke email facilities related to individual sites. Transferring hosting needs to be planned to ensure that all data and settings are re-established correctly, and particular care is needed in relation to moving large eCommerce databases.
We have drawn up a plan of monthly work to be done on the sites through to the end of the year covering improvements, increased functionality and content upgrades. My web task scribble pad has new items added to it every day.
Our next step is to make the leap into Facebook and possibly Twitter participation. I have to be honest, I am not sure that I really get these in relation to our business, although I have joined Twitter myself. Looks like more Dummies manuals and perhaps a seminar or two are again needed…
Peter Faulkner is chairman and owner of Faulkner Packaging, which was founded on Friday 14th September 1860. He lives in Dalkey and has three adult children. He is a former chairman of the SFA and was one of the founders of ISME. He was a member of the government Taskforce on Small Business. His sites include www.discountpackaging.ie, www.snazzybags.com, www.snazzybags.co.uk, www.faulkner.ie, www.alububble.ie, www.95kpabags.com, plus a bunch of micro sites.
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Hi Peter,
It’s good that you found someone who could do both.. That is what I do (web dev and web design) but I find that generally designers and developers are separate people, which makes sense.
With all the new web technologies out there and rapidly changing design trends it’s very difficult to keep up with both channels of work at the same time and this is another reason designers and developers are not supppsed the same person..but they are quite a lot of the time, which can half the amount of time they can spend keeping abreast of new techniques in each area.
I’ve also heard many times from clients that they’ve been quoted (what they deem to be) ludicrous fees from those designers who appear to be higher qualified (and oftentimes, again according to clients i’ve spoken to, produce outdated, carbon copy websites). I don’t know why this is, maybe they’re sticking to how they learned to build websites when they were in school?
All in all it’s great to see irish businesses embracing the web, the first place I go to when investigating a product/service I’m interested in is to their website (or Google).
emm.. what?
Well done! The game is changing fast though. Nowadays apps are the rage and since 75% of web surfing is done via smart phones it brings an added value to a small business like mine. I invested 1,200 in an app and within a month I got repaid by repeat customers who Googled Dingle and found our wine bar. Additionally I have included what’s going on in the town all year round so that potential tourists can be a part of it. Good publicity is always at a premium.
Excellent column. In a similar position myself with a small thriving offline business. There are many good courses out there who can set you up with the knowledge but you need to have a set plan in place of what needs to be achieved Content is definitely king and a good site will need to be updated constantly. I think it’s important for business owners to be hands on with content. Having a 3rd party manager I can’t help but feel dilutes the effectiveness of the site and content.
As both a designer and devolver for years don’t overlook Facebook and twitter and say that it won’t suit your business . They suit every business it’s an easy way of keeping in contact with your audience and customers . If you could make one phone call per day and it would 5 minutes and you could tell all your customers what was going on in your business , what offers you had or maybe a news article that all your clients could relate to you surely would do this every day.
It’s that easy to write
An article on Facebook for business but if it is a business page keep it professional , your customers don’t wanna know that your getting a curry or that your running late for work or the kids are wrecking your head , they want to know more about your business , what’s on offer , what’s new an what’s news in your sector.
http://Www.irishwebcreations.com
Well done Peter, it’s not easy to run a business and take on the website yourself at the same time.
There’s a scheme run by Google for getting Irish businesses online for free for any SMEs without a website: http://www.gettingbusinessonline.ie/
Em free? Free usually means read the small print even more carefully. Free year one only. The site builder application included will get you 0-60 but is not adequate for getting you to 100% . Just read the small print and be satisfied it will do the job for now and the future.
So here we have a confirmation that if the web is important to your business, you need to read up on it and become a semi-expert yourself. That way at least you’ll know what to want, what can be done and what can’t, what’s easy and what’s difficult, and how much things should cost you.
Fair play and well done.
I am SO glad you remembered to talk about managing the presence once it is live. There are countless examples of sites that die slow horrible deaths from lack of ongoing management & investment. A practical framework for site management can be downloaded at http://www.diffily.com/book/
Millions of euro has been totally wasted in the Irish economy on sites that – once built – were not maintained, fell into disrepair and then required “redesign”. In fact, “redesign” is often the most depressing word you can use as regards your website.
As per the article above, the best sites succeed not because of “redesign”, but because they are tweaked every day in small ways on a sound analysis of data.
“with special cleaning care” ha ha, that made me laugh. Frank, based on that ad, I wouldn’t let you near my car…
HI PAUL THANKS FOR YOUR COMMENT ANYWAY WONT BE LOOKING FOR YOUR BUSINESS MAYBE YOU SHOULD STICK TO THE BIKE
I see by you Facebook account that you went to ‘trinity collage’… Great stuff, you are my new internet marketing hero.
Well done, good to see what can be achieved, very interesting article.
Finally we get the angle of a business building a website…
A key point to remember is that a website is being built to suit a business objective and not for a developer to fit a project within the limits of his/her knowledge and skills.
Agreed with Shane, once the website is live, the real work is only starting. Beside the usual online marketing and visibility, a website is a lot of testing & tweaking: it is a customer / user centric on going exercise.
Check this article on web stress http://goo.gl/afSTo and this infographic on website optimisation http://goo.gl/X9yCV
A good website that reflects your brand is just the beginning. To operate a successful business, and amplify your offline efforts you need to optimize your operations, marketing, ecommerce if applicable and your relationship management. Luckily this is possible and much more effective and quick to get going than ever before. Check us out — we can help – http://www.newpathconsulting.com
Terrific article by the way — your story reasonates with all of our clients.
Enjoyed this, informative.
It is almost impossible to find a designer that can also code and so you are better off getting a designer to do your branding and webskin at the same time and then pass that work to a developer, like managing the construction of a house you could get that work done independently and be the project manager. If you go to an agency to supply designer and developer that’s where the charges come in because they have to pay rent, marketing costs, designers and developers at which point even a very basic site will cost you in the region of 2K. Totally agree re. hosting, you can host 50-100 sites on a relatively inexpensive hosting package approx €100, it would be madness for a company to have hosting spread all over the place.
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