In the midst of the Great Recession, I find it ironic that Network Solutions – already a target of criticism for nuisance up-sell advertisements and expensive domain registration – has decided to reinvent the wheel.  While businesses everywhere are forced to downsize and get back to the basics of delivering value, Network Solutions has decided to go in the opposite direction by burdening their existing customers with new proprietary terms for familiar products and services.  They’re all prefixed with “ns” for “Network Solutions,” ostensibly to serve a misguided campaign to supplant 100% of the Internet’s existing competition not by virtue of delivering value, but simply through re-branding.  Apparently they’re under the delusion that either (A.) customers will come to adopt the term “nsWebAddress” instead of “domain,” or (B.) customers will be so impressed by their ambitious marketing they’ll forgive Netsol for confusing them, and won’t cancel their renewals.  (Of course, you have to first find the renewals screen in order to configure it.)

That someone convinced Netsol upper management to invest heavily in a more bloated user experience – alienating existing customers and probably scaring off new business, both unsolicited and through potential referrals – is almost too hard to believe.  Reminds me of a line from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  Three days into a marathon LSD-induced trampoline session, a bearded, bouncing Dewey announces to his manager ”I’m reinventing music, into something I call schmusic!”

Could it be an elaborate prank?

A lot has been said about Web 2.0 and agile methodologies in the world of IT professionals, but little if any of it is meaningful for your average small business owner selling, say, handmade organically-derived hypoallergenic soap.

User Driven Hosting was created as a simple concept, a simple mission with simple goals:

• Empower small business owners to leverage the internet to grow their business
• Specifically, showing them how to leverage existing resources instead of “reinventing the wheel”

You’ll see this come up on this site again and again as a recurring theme.  One of the concepts of agile programming is the acronym “DRY” – don’t repeat yourself.  Programmers got smart and decided to stop repeating work and use libraries of commonly-used functions and other code to the maximum extent in order to reduce the amount of time required to create and maintain applications.  Web designers haven’t quite caught up with this trend.  Unfortunately many web design boutiques and local web design “shops” and vendors enjoy reinventing the wheel only to pass the cost along to the customer.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of small business websites share the same features.  Similar navigation and content structure, and similar application of “design.”  (This doesn’t apply to fancy Flash-driven sites, but then we’re not in the Flash site design market.)

User Driven Hosting’s mission for each client is to quickly deploy a site built on an open-source, ubiquitous and rigorously-tested website framework.  The technical specifics aren’t as important as what it does, and what the net value translates to:

• The ability to easily manage content – adding pages, editing pages, adding photos, video, items for sale
• Extendability – “plugins” or external sets of features written by 3rd parties to enhance this framework allow site owners to import other blogs, Flickr photo accounts, and countless other features…the possibilities grow daily
• Low cost per unit time – no SMB just getting plugged into the internet should spend thousands and thousands on web design unless they can justify it in sales

The bottom line is that agile web design = working smarter, not harder.  Using existing resources, and working within flexible but reasonable rules to favor a practical and useful conventions over a website design – and budget – with unknown boundaries.  As the agile programming language tool Ruby on Rails advertises, favor “convention over configuration.”  Don’t sweat the small details, the sink fixtures and cabinet handles and shower curtain rings.  Put your efforts behind the important tasks, such as running your business and educating new customers with a smart website, and everything else will fall into place.  That’s what we are here to help you do.

Thinking of hiring someone to design your small or medium-sized business website? Here’s some information you might find helpful. A quick overview of what you should know:

• You don’t need to spend a lot of money if your website is not a business hub or profit center.
• If you’re in the above category AND don’t know much about computers, the internet and IT in general, you’re better off purchasing a do-it-yourself turnkey package designed for business owners like you…the alternative is hiring an “expert” to do a small job and having to take their word for it that the investment you’re making is worth it.
• Don’t be artistic. If you’re hiring a web designer, let them do their job.  Don’t dream up specific visions of a certain layout and color scheme; if you had the knack for web design you’d never have considered hiring a designer in the future.  It’s their job to know what is practical and what isn’t, and what holds up to contemporary design standards, etc.  Don’t jeopardize even your small investment by getting involved in a project outside your area of expertise.  It is a difficult impulse to stifle, but if you are TRULY driven for success you will know that you need to keep your eye on the big picture, and not the scribbling and bibbling.

First of all, as a provider of business web design and development services, I believe these should be your priorities:

• Budget: As an SMB, you probably are (and should be) preoccupied with return on investment. Consider the economic impact your website will potentially have on your bottom line, and let that dictate your budget.  If you are a home remodeling contractor and it is critical to make a jaw-dropping first impression, then you may need a bonafide designer worth their rate.  If the website is simply a business card directing web users to your brick-and-mortar business, then you can justify spending less.
• Service Level: Depending on your budget, you will want to decide what kind of service level you require. Are you a do-it-yourselfer? If the answer is yes, then be prepared to invest a lot of time.  If the site is a profit center, like an online record store, that’s time well-spent.  If you’re a CPA, then you’re wasting company time.  Outsource that task and ultimately you will save money because time and money become really part of the same pool of resources in a business.

Web design can be a black hole. If your budget is as small as $250-$1,000, don’t bother to look for a custom web designer because anyone willing to work with this kind of a budget is by necessity not qualified to properly manage such a small budget or better yet consider your business objectives, and the exceptions are very, very rare. Instead, save that money to power your site with a turnkey package..

I believe the small to medium-sized business client looking for a website but without any potential forecast website ROI has nothing to lose by experimenting initially with an affordable , lightweight and relatively turnkey package, bypassing the web design “middle man” altogether.

When your needs have truly outgrown a turnkey package, you’re ready for the pricier custom development.  You will ultimately get what you pay for, but in the world of the internet you’ll be surprised how much value there is in a small but strategic investment.

Google, with all due respect to anyone else in the software game, is really looking way ahead. The way they’ve poured research & development into both their robust network and their array of useful tools really demonstrates what is to me a comforting emphasis on utility and common sense above all. I don’t see Google trying to be everything to everyone, but rather a big-picture plan to improve the way things work for consumers and businesses, and really just make everything secondary to delivery of undeniable value.

As an SMB there are a number of ways to really leverage Google. Here’s a short list of ways your average web newbie business owner can make use of their tools:

• Search engine – People can debate the Google algorithm until they’re blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that it serves relevant answers to specific keyword searches…feed the search engine relevant, topic-specific information from a relevant, topic-specific website, and the Google search engine will rise up to meet demand by offering up your URLs in response. It’s common sense; if you build it, the traffic will come and while the “specialists” will do everything they can to get you to hire them to do this, the bottom line is that meaningful, relevant answers – and lots of them – are what you need. Use common sense and feed the information machine what it is hungry for. Your customers are using Google, trying to find answers.
• Gmail - After years of relying on a rather ubiquitous mail client which is packaged with a software suite, I realized it sucked after I had to run special repair tools on the massive proprietary file types which represented all of my critical communication for the last N units of time. This “corruption” event happened approximately every six months, when the inbox reached about 1GB in size (easy to do if you’re regularly receiving binary file attachments.) Also, since a mail client like this downloads everything from your webservers, unless you’re making regular web server backups nothing you have is protected…it’s scared and alone and vulnerable on your local machine, where it can be deleted, infected, quarantined, corrupted, melted, or otherwise rendered useless. Gmail makes many of these challenges moot. It’s remotely hosted, so Google assumes the performance and backup overhead while you enjoy lots of filespace and redundancy and security. Instead of chewing up your CPU searching for an email, the Google Gmail server handles the load with labels, which can now be color-coded and applied automatically as filters. And, you don’t have to worry about your easily-corrupted ubiquitous operating system on your local machine rendering your inbox inaccessible. Access Gmail from anywhere, and everything’s as you left it. They even have a decent version for PDAs and smartphones. Additionally, GoogleTalk (the chat client packaged to work with Gmail) maintains lightweight transcripts that don’t require the damn Java virtual machine to gobble up your resources. Forget everything but Gmail for your email and chatting, if you want to simply USE the tools instead of constantly fighting to preserve and tweak and improve their performance.
• Documents and Spreadsheets – The future of office programs is software as a service. There is NO REASON in the world for a frickin’ word processor to run on your local machine as a bloated application that hogs resources and becomes naturally corrupted as a function of time. Every individual has the right to a lightweight, hosted word processor and spreadsheet program that communicates with and imports/exports popular file formats easily. Let your local machine remain unfettered, and let Google’s robust servers handle the word processing and number-crunching. They’re also saved remotely so no need to backup…ANOTHER great time- and business-saver.
• YouTube – Again, think of Google (the search engine) as an answer machine that feeds hungrily on relevant, topic-specific information. In the context of a universe in which relevant information rises up to meet specific demand, YouTube is a great demonstration of this. Instant access to everything from old episodes of The Greatest American Hero, to a video tutorial of how to replace the LCD on your Treo, to viral marketing videos. YouTube gives you the audience and the exposure, all you have to do to unlock it is offer up something of video value. A tremendous opportunity for a business owner with something useful to say, free or not.
• Blogging – Build your initial site around a turnkey blog using blogspot.com, Google’s blogging tool. It’s a time-tested, ever-improving and easy-to-use web publishing tool that can get you set up with your standard run-of-the-mill business card website and more, and empower you to regularly publish relevant content. You likely won’t win any art contests with their standard out-of-the-box themes, of course, but then your focus should be on WHAT you’re saying, and not HOW you’re saying it, because ultimately that is what is of value to your customers.

See how far you can get using Google’s tools to establish your business on the web. You may be (really) surprised.