Is your web site a money pit?

< Communication Tools of Choice - Shane Merem

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March 14th, 2005 at 8:04 am star

Really! You see it happen all the time. The optimistic first time home owner purchases what seems to be a great deal. A dream home. Suddenly the plumbing needs work, the heater goes bad. The "home warranty" fine print says the water heater is not covered. You know how the story ends.

Don't let this happen when you purchase your web site. With todays web site technology you can purchase a web site that SAVES you money. Here is what I mean -- Traditionally you would pay a "programmer" to build your entire web site. A few weeks later when you decided to add your new "toll free" phone number to your web site you would call your programmer, ask him or her to add your phone number and expect a bill for fifty bucks! Over a couple years you may spend hundreds of sometimes thousands of dollars maintaining your web site. OR you may neglect the site due to the inconvenience and cost.

I have provided commercial web sites to customers for over 10 years. Early in my web site career I found that any company serious about their web site demanded real-time access to the content of their site. So we started providing web based tools to our customers so they could modify major aspects of the site without any programming. Not only could they quickly change their web site.. it did not cost them money each time they did! I have managed well over 900 web site projects since.

The reason I'm writing this article is because I talk to people every day that talk to web site vendors that try to sell them a web site that COSTS MONEY to maintain. Yes. They are told that after 90 days they will pay a "per incident" or "per hour" fee to make changes. That's like buying a 2005 car without power windows! How many late model year cars can you buy without power windows? You can't and you should not be able to.

The worst part is people make this sound GOOD. The biggest thing I hear is "You don't want a templated site do you?". Well the answer is YES YOU DO! Do you think like Yahoo!, Google and Amazon.com require a programmer every time they change their web site? Of course not. They do exactly what I do. Templated sites can provide a way to modify the content without expensive programming.

A template based system does not mean it looks plain or ugly. A GOOD template based system like www.WebsiteForge.com can be designed to look great. You can still have custom designed graphics. More importantly a template based system is much more reliable, is loaded with features, better tested, and often better supported than sites coded from scratch each time. All that being said -- I understand there are quite a few very bad template based site builders out there. When you spend 6 dollars, that's what you get -- A 6 dollar web site! You do get what you pay for. Just don't let the term "template" get a bad rap because of a few bad vendors.