Form or substance? Web Development on a Budget

Part II - Sticking to the Fundamentals

By Garnet R. Chaney

During the go-go days of the dot-com boom, I watched investor infested companies spend thousands of dollars on graphic designers to produce changes to their sites that harmed their search engine rankings, or made their sites impenetrable. I watched companies take fairly good sites and slow them down dramatically with graphically oriented pull down animated menus that sometimes didn't work on some browsers. Fortunately my experience on the web predated the dot-com boom, which for most small businesses was a lot like today: Now it is the same as it was then, businesses were skeptical of large budget websites.

Fortunately I am well prepared to deal with such realities. I have a perspective on computers that goes back almost as far as many current web designers have been alive. When I began programming, it was a luxury to have as much as 8,000 bytes of memory! Not even floppy disks were yet commonplace. That taught me to conserve memory wherever possible. In the early days of the web, the speed of the typical dialup line were slow, and my early experience at conserving space was very helpful. For me, it was second nature to design my early sites to conserve bandwidth, and to also design sites that would run on every browser, including America Online. While I and other developers scoffed at the kind of people who would sign up for AOL accounts, I knew that they were a big source of web traffic for my sites, so I kept my sites simple, so as not to loose any of this audience.

To this day I still use a simple ASCII text editor for most of my editing of sites such as this site. It forces me to stick to the fundamentals, and not lard up my sites with useless extra formatting.

The other basic principle of business that should be remembered during web design is this: There ain't no free lunch. Every minute spent on developing a website is paid for, somehow, by someone. If web design is a hobby, then it really doesn't matter how much of your own time you spend on your own website. But when you are developing sites for clients, you should be sure that you are focusing on maximum return on their investment. Don't waste their money, and your time, on things that aren't fundamental, unless they really insist that they have a lot of extra money to waste. And even then, unless they are the size of Pepsi Cola or Amazon, you should still help them focus on the fundamentals.

Even if the business has plenty of money to waste, someone somewhere is paying for that waste. Perhaps it filters all the way down to their customers having to pay a higher price for the product, or perhaps the bucks wasted came from some retiree's pension fund. Lean design can help a business keep down it's costs to it's customers, and lean design makes the best use of an investors money.

Sometimes, the business that have the hardest time keeping this focus on fundamentals are the small one man shows. I know of a small consulting company where the owner spent literally days to design a single page website to promote his own company. He's wasted whole days micromanaging the cheap $20/day labor of Ukranian web designers to build his one page site, and he somehow thinks that is a good deal. Until I mentioned it, he totally missed the point that his spending a whole day of his time to micromanage the work cost him over $400 in billable time!

One time he spent 4 hours of my time just helping him make a minor tweak to the background color. Why did I let 4 hours of my life be wasted? I really wanted to help him out. But I admit I was stunned, like a deer in an SUV's headlights, that someone could be so fussy. I couldn't believe so much time could be spent by this client, who was going broke, on something of so little significance.

Sure his one page site does look nicer, but that extra 5% improvement from all those days will not bring any extra visitor to his website. (Oh, did I mention that a month later he threw away the color we worked so hard to find, and changed to an entirely different color theme?) For months I've told him how to build real traffic, for free, by expanding his website, but he insists on wasting money month after month on Google adwords, and on cramming even more stuff into his single page. The more he crams into the single page, the more his response rate drops, and the more time he spends agonizing over it and trying to figure out why.

To me, the answer is obvious: With an attitude typical of the go-go dot-com frenzy, he ignored the fundamental axioms of web design. He has totally missed the chance to build a forest while he focuses on a single leaf that almost no one will ever see. Because he has no accountability to anyone other than himself, there is no one to help him focus on reality. Well, there was me to help him focus, but I reached the point where I realized I've got fundamentals of my own to tend to.

Contrast that experience with this one: I recently helped a friend renovate his website, ChiroTX.com. He'd built a simple website that was just 8 pages, but he wanted to go farther than the online website builder tools would allow. I took his pages and imported them into FrontPage, and I built a theme that roughly approximated the color scheme of his old site. With the carte blanche he gave me, and his wish to have "the best chiropractic site on the net", I went to work expanding his site to be a true resource for his patients. Within a day I'd upgraded him to a real web hosting account, and turned his site into a 50 page website of real interest to the kind of patients he was looking for. Within another week, his site was 150 pages, and he is well trained on how to add more relevant information to his site. It has been a total joy to work with him on his site. We've never spent more than a few minutes worrying about exact shades of colors. Instead he listens with rapt attention to all the hints I have for him about how to build quality information for his patients, and to attract more traffic to his web site.

Guess which client's site is passing up it's competitors and consistently achieving top ten rankings on search terms that have tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of results? Guess who is watching his free website traffic more than double each month? Guess who is seeing an increase in referals and people coming in to buy his services?

Remember, content is king, and words are content. Graphics should only be used where they help the words tell their story better. And even then, those pictures should be backed up with good descriptions that are compatible with various accessibility standards for the handicapped.

On to Part III - Case Study: Design of a Budget Hosting Offer