Why Christmas is the perfect time to start building your own website

What will you be doing over Christmas?

If you’ve had a busy year and are anything like me, you’ll be lying in a darkened room with a cold flannel over your forehead, a box of chocolates in one hand and a large bottle of wine in the other!

However, if you have recently started your own business, you might be thinking about getting a website built. You might even be thinking about building it yourself, to save money maybe, or because you’d like to have full control over your site, or maybe just because you’re just plain interested in that kind of thing.

What better time to do it!  Many businesses close down for the entire Christmas period, which could be up to 2 weeks in some cases, so you’re confined to the house with assorted relatives and enough food to feed several armies.  What else have you got to do apart from endlessly channel-hopping through “The Great Escape”, “Toy Story”, and “Bridge over the River Kwai”, or listen to Aunt Mabel ask you for the 49th time what time dinner will be ready?

This is the ideal time to escape it all and get your website built! However, there’s the small problem of how you’re going to do it. Are you an HTML programmer?  If so, forgive me for even writing this, you know what you’re doing and don’t need any help or advice.  Are you a Dreamweaver whizz kid? Ditto.

However, if like the majority of us, you’re a normal person who knows a normal (ok, very little) amount about the web and how it works, you might want to look at a website builder package.  A website builder is a tool that allows the construction of websites without the need for manual code editing.

You might have seen some of these advertised on TV. Mostly these are online packages, which means that all you need is access to the internet from your pc, laptop, ipad, tablet or smartphone, and you can log-on and create and manage your own website from scratch. An example of a website builder is WebMaker CMS. The main advantage of an online website builder is that it is quick and easy to use, and does not require any experience. Often a website can be built and be up and running live on the internet quickly. Technical support is usually provided, as are how to video and help files. This makes online website builders ideal for the beginner.

Some of these packages are completely free (watch out for hidden costs), but most require a small monthly or annual fee. You can usually choose from a whole range of designs and colours, and can upload your own images and logos, and add your own text. Some packages have lots of extra features that let you send newsletters to your customers, ecommerce modules so you can sell online, polls or videos or other features.  The best ones also handle SEO so that your site can get found by the search engines once you’ve built it and link in with Google Analytics so you can see how your site is performing.

So now you can add your website builder package to your list for Santa, and get going on building your fantastic new site!  If you’re planning on building your own website over Christmas, do let me know.

Can you really build your own website with a DIY website design package?

An opinion on a recent Yell.com article

I read an article today by Yell.com, who were advising people on whether they could, or should, try to build their own website.

Their advice was pretty straightforward. Yes, they said, if you want to build a fairly basic website, you can use one of the new DIY web design packages. But then they said that if you use one of these packages, you won’t be able to adapt the software to suit your own specific requirements.

I don’t agree with this – in my experience, and certainly with our own WebMaker package, you can build quite complex websites, even ecommerce websites, using a DIY web design package or website builder. It all comes down to which package you choose.  Some will be quite restrictive in what you can do, others will be very open and will allow you to change and add all manner of extra functions.

So, as with all these things, if you’re thinking of doing it yourself, make sure you investigate just how flexible your proposed website builder package will be.  Ask to see examples of working sites that use it, for example, our WebMaker site was built with WebMakerCMS DIY website builder software, and it is an all-singing, all-dancing site that we use to sell our product via an online shop. It’s easy to use, you can choose from 100 different designs and you can see how each page on your site will look before you make it live.

I think Yell.com don’t have it quite right when they say that you need training in writing and using HTML if you want to build a more complex or ecommerce site – what do you think?

How easy is it to get your corporate website updated?

Does it frustrate you that you can’t get your latest news, products or events online quickly?  How about creating your own website or microsite to get what you need?

Most of our clients want their website to sell for them.  Not necessarily by having an online shopping cart or ecommerce, but they want to be able to promote their new products, new special offers or new events, as soon as they are available.

Sadly, it’s not that easy for a lot of people, especially if you work for a foreign-owned company who like to control all the content of the corporate website.  I’ve known some companies take months just to make a simple change to the corporate website, and in some cases, it just doesn’t happen at all! Clearly this is very frustrating if you just want to get on with the job of meeting your sales targets and actually SELL your products and services.

One solution to this kind of problem is to build your own small microsite just for your part of the company, or maybe just for this new product or event.  You can do this with the increasing number of website building packages coming on to the market.  These packages are designed to be used by a marketing or business person, who doesn’t need to be technical, and doesn’t need to know any HTML or web programming languages.  The only capabilities you need are the ability to use an internet browser, be able to use a Word-like text editor, and be able to upload images using the usual file browse and select method.  You can usually choose from lots of different designs, colours and layouts, so that you can make your microsite fit in with all your corporate brand guidelines.  And you can upload your own logos, images, pdf downloads, video and audio.

Many of our clients have used our WebMaker website builder to create a microsite in this way. One client wanted to build a site that focused on a big press launch, and wanted to invite journalists to register for an event.  Another wanted a site to offer sales-related information to their business partners, and another wanted a separate site to promote their environment friendly approach to business.

Please click to contact me if you’d like to know more about building a microsite yourself.

Would you build your own website?

The Sunday Times recently did a feature called “Creating a Website? It’s Child’s Play” (23rd October, InGear section).

The writer had looked at various website building packages and claimed that building a site from scratch no longer requires specialist knowledge. He’s absolutely right of course – it used to be the case that building a website was one of those dark arts that involved groups of sandal-wearing programmers, sitting around in dim lit rooms, smoking strange cigarettes and was best left alone by the average person in the street.

But like most things tecchie, packages came along that meant you could design and build web pages without knowing anything about the various programming languages involved, such as HTML. Products like Dreamweaver were used by designers – but even these packages needed quite a lot of tecchie knowledge.

In the last few years, packages were developed that allowed people to build or edit their own websites.  At first, these were rather cumbersome packages which were aimed at corporates who wanted to give their marketing department heads the ability to update web pages on the fly, to add in a news announcement or an event, for example. These packages are all called “CMS” or “Content Management System” packages and can cost anywhere from zero to thousands of pounds. Some are extremely difficult to use, others much easier, but are often designed with the larger website in mind.

More recently, tech firms have realised that smaller businesses want to design and build their own website – or maybe a large corporate may want to build a smaller, separate “micro-site”, for a special project or campaign.  Even non-business people want to build their own websites these days, maybe you run a club or have a special interest you want to share online with friends and family. After all, how difficult can it be?

Luckily, in many cases, it’s not difficult at all.  Packages are now available from software companies, which are specifically aimed at the non-technical user.  You pick from a selection of designs, upload your own colours and logo, and then you can add your own pages, images, content, forms and whatever else you need to make up your website.  Some of these packages can create quite sophisticated sites, suitable for small to medium sized businesses and can be a useful place to start, either for your very first website, or maybe one that you want to look a bit more professional after a basic first attempt, which you later realise, doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Not wanting to blow our own trumpet at all, but if you’re really interested in finding a website builder package, you could take a look at WebMaker, which is a package we sell at Insight.

If you’ve had any experience with these kinds of packages, please let me know, we’re always interested to hear about people’s experiences.