Webmastering Biker

What do you think is the greatest obstacle to a professional web designer. Believe it or not, but up there at the top, one of the biggest hurdles that I face when pitching to a company about corporate web work is the already incumbent web designer who currently does that company's online work. Not altogether surprising, but then you wouldn't realise how many corporate web sites are made and maintained by someone who know's someone whose son is a web designer. Knowing a web designer isn't necessarily a bad thing, I do sites for friends and relatives for mates rates and help them out. What I am getting at with business sites relates to what luke says in our work blog about the cheap alternative proving more expensive in the long run.

The thing is, is that web designers are like builders, there are lot’s of them at varying degrees of standard and everyone knows ‘a friend of a friend’ who is one. Just because you know someone who’s cousin’s, friend’s, brother’s, bank accountant’s sister is a web designer and can probably get you a good deal, doesn't make it the right decision to choose that person. Cost rarely is a good decision in getting professional services. The real decision in today's world is what that person can achieve with the site that they create. With WYSIWYG programmes and off the shelf sites it really is simple for anyone to be a 'web designer'. However, with only limited knowledge of online marketing, social media, search engine optimisation etc. the cheap alternative is not altogether the most advantageous.

Coming a close second to the 'bedroom' site designed by the managing directors cousin, the other main competition I encounter is the "professionaly designed" site from a web design company. How many business sites today are created with state of the art content management systems, flash sites and glitzy graphics only to prove unwieldy, unmanageable and totaly inneffective for the purposes of the business it is aimed at serving? Quite a few.

To give an example of such a costly web mistake, I have seen tens of thousands of pounds spent on content management systems for companies whose sites don't bring in any business. To add to this, the company's that pay for this, rarely have the need to update their site catalogues or site structure to warrant a content management system in the first place. If you take into account what I said in my last post about measuring return on investment in webdesign then these companies are wasting money foolishly.

The two pitfalls a company can fall into in creating a web site is that of cost. On one hand, there is the designer who focuses on cost and saving money and on the other hand there is the other designer who smells profit and focuses on selling you a site that is all singing and dancing. Neither of these sites focuses on what should be at the heart of any web project, the ultimate goal of the site and it's return on investment.