Small Website Challenges

When times are bad, companies will often look for new revenue sources by expanding out to different markets. For businesses that offer expertise, such as website development or IT administration, this could mean offering a different type of expertise that is complementary to what they already have, or going after a different target audience with the same offerings. For example, a team that normally builds websites for medium-sized companies may tweak their sales and marketing to attract smaller clients — single-owner businesses.

Sounds like a reasonable move – every business needs a website these days. If you have the skills and tools to build a complex e-commerce site, how difficult can it be to build a simple website-plus-shopping cart for a single-owner business? Think of all the small home-based businesses out there without websites. Think of all the low-end shopping cart software that costs less than $300, all customizable. This could be fertile ground.

It’s just an exercise in scaling down your project management and technology, right?

Trouble is, unless the business owner is conversant with websites from both the business and technical aspects, you will need to provide a lot of education and guidance. You won’t have an RFP to help you scope the project or to understand the business and its online needs. You will need to learn about the quirks of their business and whether your preferred shopping cart software can handle them. All this before you (yes, you, not the client) can come up with a realistic set of requirements. Not to mention doing it all on a budget that will allow you to deliver something you’d be happy to list on your portfolio. Nope, it’s not about scaling technology, it’s an exercise in front-loading the project with consulting and support services. Because chances are while the customer knows everything there is to know about aromatherapy, fitness training, fine foods or vintage records, he knows nothing about building websites.

So, assuming you’ve decided to go trolling for web development business with small, single-owner businesses, here are some observations:

Offer professional content development as one of your services. This is a useful way to help both you and the client determine the information categories for the website. It helps to move the project along because you won’t be waiting for the client to deliver content. It ensures quality content – no matter how beautiful your design and intuitive the navigation, bad writing sabotages the effectiveness of the site.

For business owners who are not IT professionals, it can be difficult just organizing their ideas. I spent an interesting evening with a couple of very successful consultants from the healthcare industry. They are highly experienced users of Microsoft Office, Project, and Visio — not afraid of using technology. But when it came to structuring information for a professional website, they were overwhelmed. We went through an exercise of categorizing the type of information they wanted to present, which pages would have links to other pages, how much detail to provide, the fact that they could build two different pages to target two types of clients (corporations and individuals), and privacy issues.

Be sure you understand the customer’s online requirements in detail. There is some pretty good shopping cart software available for $300 or less. Most will handle 90% of online product ordering quirks. But every time you have to customize or change code, this extra work costs hard dollars. The problem is the customer is not experienced enough to warn you up front about the quirks. You really, really need to determine requirements in more detail than for web-literate customers.

As an example, I know a team of very smart, customer-focused web developers who took on a project for the owner of a cheque printing business. He wanted a shopping cart for ordering cheques online. I doubt they made money on this project because although there were only three types of cheques (manual, laser, continuous forms), there were a lot of options. It wasn’t like ordering a sweater in S, M, L and blue or pink. There were multiple colour and background options. Customers could order cheques in specified amounts of 200 – 5000. Customers also could attach a company logo to be printed on the cheque. Then there was the numbering on the cheques, not to mention the company’s and bank’s name.

In this situation, they were able to use workarounds and a few bits of custom programming to meet the requirements. But it all added up to more work than they had counted on; some of the tweaks they did partway through the project would have been easier to handle had they realized the issues earlier. Given the requirements, perhaps a different shopping cart would have been a better choice.

Use meaningful placeholder text in pages when you are showing work-in-progress. Rather than leave a page blank, populate it with text that indicates what should be on the page once it’s complete. “Your shipping terms and conditions go here”. Or the client will freak. Do not expect the customer to be able to visualize or understand how close you really are to being finished, or how trivial it is to add missing functionality. The more sample content you provide, the better. In general, I’d say that account management goes more smoothly if you are able to populate the work-in-progress in a way that helps the customer visualize the finished result. Remember that suggestion about a professional content developer.

Really know your system capabilities. When you have a low budget website, the temptation is to use lower-cost components, such as a cheaper shopping cart. Which you may not know as well as the one you normally use. Which could trip you up. In that online cheque store example, the shopping cart took all those colour, quantity, and address fields on a cheque order and turned them into one long text string description that looked terrible on the invoice – and in other places. This is not an issue if you know about this in advance and can (a) discuss with the customer how to format the invoice and (b) build some custom programming into the price.

Build some packaged services. Package A: website with a blog and no e-commerce. Package B: website with blog, shopping cart of up to 10 products with 5 order options each. Package C: website with blog, shopping cart, and up to 5 plug-ins for social networking. You get the idea. This is a low-budget customer, but if you put some parameters around the deliverables and build some templates to reduce actual development effort, you can still turn a profit.

Good documentation reduces support costs (and customer frustration). The “let them use Wordpress” approach just won’t work here when it comes to ongoing content management. If you are serious about building websites for small businesses, it’s worth investing in some “how to” document templates that the project team (and content developer) can fill in along the way. The customer might pay for your time to manage and edit the website, but if not, hand over a manual that shows exactly where every page, every product photo, product description, every price code lives. Also where every line of text that shows up on the screen, an invoice, or an automated email lives — and how to change or delete it. Hopefully, this will be a cut & paste exercise that is repeatable for each customer.

Repeatable really is the key to structuring low-budget projects. Low budget means you need to turn over a lot of these projects to equal the revenues of a large project. The more you can package up your services and delivery method, the lower your cost per project and the faster you can move on to the next. The most challenging part of working with a single-owner business is working with the client at a consultative level to determine requirements. This is also where you can really impress the customer with your willingness to learn about their business, helpful approach, and proactive ideas.

This is what you want because with this type of customer, word-of-mouth referral is your best advertising.