FOR Sabino Matera the goal was to have the Quoco website up and running for the Taste of Sydney event last March where he had paid to have a stand to display food products imported from Puglia in Italy.
But despite having a background in writing code in the information technology industry, Matera found he was tripped up at every step in getting his website up and running for the launch, with the designers eventually missing his all important deadlines.
“It’s been really, really frustrating,” Matera says. “Everything is related to budget, but we had ridiculous quotes from $4000 to $55,000 for exactly the same brief.”
Not wanting to go for the cheapest or the most expensive, he made the mistake of choosing a company run by a friend.
But that turned out to be the wrong choice, with everything being outsourced to third parties and his website, when it eventually went live, being riddled with errors and the costs going out of control.
“They were using a free content management system and they were charging us money for it,” Matera says.
“I’m not just someone who doesn’t have a clue. I was a programmer. I used to write code.”
Matera’s story isn’t uncommon among small and medium enterprises, which rely on websites but are unfamiliar in commissioning these one-off purchases.
The problem is that website development sits somewhere between two disciplines, design and IT, and that SMEs, where the directors and managers concentrate on running the sales end of the business, find it difficult to find the expertise to get value from either.
Other small businesses, most preferring to stay anonymous, have been charged not only for free open source content management systems but free plug-ins that add functionality to their websites. One recruitment company was charged $5000 a year for the free Google Analytics website visitor tracking service.
“We don’t know enough about it,” says Hollie Black, general manager of Select Scootas, who has a background in the advertising business.
“I don’t know about websites and I’m baffled by it.”
Black has paid from more than $50,000 to $10,000 for websites and has seen the best and worst of what is on offer.
“Small and medium businesses often don’t have an IT department and we rely on consultants who often give conflicting messages,” she says, adding that it reminds her of the bad old days of advertising in the early 1990s when businesses were charged through the nose.
Jurgen Schaud is senior technology officer for not-for-profit web developer Infoxchange, which specialises in IT and websites for non-profit organisations and works with free open source systems to keep costs down. He says when developing websites, which cost from $10,000 upwards, he ensures they are made so they can be updated by the organisations themselves.
Infoxchange uses a master installation of the Drupal CMS with individually designed templates, a designer skin fitting over the backend database, and trains not-for-profits to use the relatively simple interface.
Schaud says that it only takes a few hours to use these systems and they are as easily to use as Microsoft Word to publish content to the web.
“The word proprietary is generally bad,” hesays. Once locked into a proprietary system any changes to content or functionality cost money, even the simplest of processes.
“Generally, the CMSs that are the good ones are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress,” Schaud says. “Once you starting using a good free open source CMS it becomes a religious issue, really.”
KEEPING WEBSITE COSTS DOWN
2 Own the copyright of design of your website as well as copyright of graphics, pictures and content.
3 Avoid proprietary technology, especially content management systems.
4 Don’t pay for a content management system. The best ones are free and open source: Drupal, Joomla or WordPress are leaders.
5 Avoid flash animation. It is difficult and expensive to update regularly.
6 Avoid paying for website analytics. Google’s free analytics are as good as it gets, although doesn’t give statistics in real time. Sitemeter is cheap and gives real-time visitor statistics, as an addition to Google analytics.
7 Be careful of websites hosted on a web designer’s own server, as they have control of everything.
8 Be content rather than design driven, which is looked upon favourably by Google searches.
9 Ensure that you can export your content in a standard format — csv or xml ideally — should you wish to change content management system.
10 Don’t choose a friend to design your website.