There's only one reason to have a website

In my experience, a lot of business owners have a mistaken impression of what having a website means to them. They go out and pay someone thousands of dollars to build a beautiful, feature rich website with animations and multimedia, a.k.a. song and dance, and then sit on it until the technology that powers their website is obsolete. In all this time, they never recoup their investment, but they've at least bragged about how wonderful their website is while complaining about how much it costed.

Some business owners take a different approach. They don't bother to have a website in the first place because they've already seen all of their friends go through the experience in the previous paragraph.

Here's a question: why would you spend thousands of dollars on something for your business if it's not going to make money for it? Why? WHY? It doesn't make sense!

There is one and only one reason for a business to have a website: to make money.

Everything on your website needs to be devoted to that single purpose. If it is, then your website will bring in more money, and you will recoup your investment hundreds of times over.

Comfortable Makes Money

The top mistake made on the web, and it's still made, is building a website with all sorts of fancy buttons and animations and stuff. Why is it a mistake?

Quite frankly, if you're not a multimedia company, movie company, or rock band, then you don't need or want that junk. It possesses your visitor's computers, no matter how fast they are, and makes it really difficult to find anything on your website.

Here's a simple fact: your website visitors are there to find out about you and what you sell. They're not there to watch a moving piece of artwork or to be impressed with the skills of your web developer. They're there to find out what you can do for them.

So your website needs to feel more like a living room or conference room. It should be comforting, friendly, and easy to find things. That's the beginning and the end of what it needs on it. Keep it simple, tastefully decorated, and full of useful information. That's how you turn visitors into customers.

Make a website people can read

Most businesses, even with an internet presence, are still trying to get people to walk through their doors. Maybe you're a consulting firm that needs to get people to call you and make an appointment. Maybe you're a realtor who needs people to do pretty much the same thing. Maybe you're a restaurant and you just want them to show up and eat. Or you're a mechanic shop and you want people to show up with their car and ask you to install an engine. Or...or....you get the idea.

How can anybody walk through your door if they can't read your website?

What I'm getting at is simple: you don't know what web browser your visitor may be using. Back in the day, it was common to visit websites that said "You must use Internet Explorer version Whatever to view this website." It's less common now, but I still stumble across such backwards websites from time to time.

The fact is, if your customer isn't using the web browser you're using, or the one your web developer uses, or the one your mother uses, you still need them to be able to read your website! You can't satisfy yourself by getting 70% of the available market anymore. You need to be visible to 100% of the market. Whoever can't read your website will be going down the street to someone else, and we don't want that, do we?

I cut my teeth building websites that had to work in Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Over the years I've dealt with numerous Firefox revisions, Konqueror, Safari, more Opera, more Internet Explorer, and the list just keeps growing and growing and growing. Nowadays I can't even buy toilet paper without making sure it'll work in any bathroom, just because of the principle of the thing.

If you can't read it on a cell phone, it may as well not exist

And besides all the desktop web browsers, how many of your customers have cell phones? (That's a joke, obviously. All of your customers have cell phones)

At some point, you'll find a surprising number of your customers need to look at your website in a cell phone.

For most people, Google provides a nice, automated service that formats any website and makes it useful on a cell phone. And that's fine...for your competitors.

Take the initiative and the advantage (and all the revenue that comes with it) and make your website work for your customers wherever they are, so they can find you wherever you are.

Attractive

TODO: Determine if I really want this section, since it's not useful and is a tad contradictory to everything else on the page.

Even after you've built a simple, tasteful website, you're going to find that it feels somewhat bland. The fact is, even if your visitors don't like spicy foods, they do like spicy websites. Given a choice between a bland website and a spicy website from your competitor, all other things being equal, your visitor will go with the spicy website.

So you can't really slouch on the graphic design. You really need to have a simple, attractive website. Visitors should be comfortable, and reasonably impressed. And somewhere in the back of their minds, many of them will think "If they put this much attention into a website, imagine how much attention they will give me."

Show them your attention to detail, and give them something that didn't come out of some random clipart collection your nephew dropped by.

On Time and on Budget

Of course, at the end of the day, you may be thinking "This is all well and good, Dave, and I definitely want what you're describing, but I've got a budget for this sort of thing, and it's not as high as you want it." And you're probably right, it's not as high as I want it. But it's not about what I want, it's about what you need.

Quite frankly, you need me to build your website and deliver it on time and on budget.

In my experience, it's all in the planning. When you receive your estimate, you will receive a document that I have carefully thought through and checked each and every piece to make sure I can deliver each piece as promised. I will already know what your website is going to look like, what will be on each page, how many pages it will have, and so forth. I will engage you early and often to make sure that every piece is built to your satisfaction, and we will proceed smoothly to completion.

I'm reasonably relaxed, but I knuckle down to get the job done. That makes me easy to work with and reliable. What more could you ask for?