Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#41

Post by rcarrigan87 »

A lot of founders who have businesses that aren't reliant on the internet dump money on a really nice website thinking it'll be a great marketing tool. Then they end up disappointed when their website isn't generating any leads.

The web is so competitive nowadays, simply having a site (even if it looks great) won't do you any good.

10-20% of a budget should be spent on web design and 80-90% on actually marketing the website. So if you have a 5K budget you should spend around $500-$1000 on the website and the rest on marketing the website.

If you can't get something built for under 20% then maybe just put up a facebook or google places page in the interim. A website can be a huge distraction from time better spent going out and getting customers.

Also, if you're a designer doing basic business websites, keep in mind on-page SEO practices. It really bothers me when designers completely disregard search engines and do their clients a huge disservice. Designers who can talk about basic SEO principles have a huge leg up. At the end of the day, a business owner is only really interested in more business.

I'm not suggesting this is the OP, but a common mistake I see amongst founders

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#43

Post by neltnerb »

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #41

A lot of founders who have businesses that aren't reliant on the internet dump money on a really nice website thinking it'll be a great marketing tool. Then they end up disappointed when their website isn't generating any leads. The web is so competitive nowadays, simply having a site (even if it looks great) won't do you any good. 10-20% of a budget should be spent on web design and 80-90% on actually marketing the…

Excellent advice! Thanks for the comment!

In my case, I have a pretty good sense of who my customers are, and I'll be reaching out to them in person on the phone or through my networks. So mostly I just want to make it so that when I call them up and tell them who I am, and they immediately check out my website, it doesn't send up red flags.

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#44

Post by brudgers »

Creating a website for a business that isn't a website isn't work. It's attractive because it looks like work and is so much easier than the real thing.

In most of the world's businesses customers don't give a shit about your website. They care about your product. And if the business isn't generating enough revenue to build a website, that's a sign that either the product isn't viable or more productive channels for finding the first few customers aren't being adequately exploited.

If sales are occurring but they don't support hiring out a website, then the pricing model is wrong.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#45

Post by mikeman »

Would you consider someone to help build your website? If we're talking about a 10 hour project, maybe you're being quoted wrongly or there is some unclarity. Would you like to talk about the details? I make sites with Themeforest themes for small companies. Maybe there are a few options to explore. http://webodew.com. I'm Mike

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#46

Post by robotpony »

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #41

A lot of founders who have businesses that aren't reliant on the internet dump money on a really nice website thinking it'll be a great marketing tool. Then they end up disappointed when their website isn't generating any leads. The web is so competitive nowadays, simply having a site (even if it looks great) won't do you any good. 10-20% of a budget should be spent on web design and 80-90% on actually marketing the…

It's a common mistake for medium and large companies too. Most budgets are poured into design and development, which encourages adding requirements, more design, etc., not leaving anything for ongoing content development and marketing. The result is a site with more pages than it needs and pages that are all boilerplate, puff, and sparsely related to pushing the purpose. The effort is distracting and mostly futile, especially lacking marketing time and effort.

If I can make a recommendation, the only pages that should be added to the web are those that make the it better. Are you a web services company? Expose your service as part of your site (Github does this by providing a Google-searchable central hub of OSS projects). Are you a non-profit? Obsess over getting people involved instead of spreading your message: adding people builds up your voice, spreading your message spreads you thinner (and adding people spreads your message with less effort). SEO is best played as adding, building, and providing useful things (or collaborations). And the best improvements in search rankings is had by providing useful things for people to reference (the Github example again). If you're not providing something to link to, preferably a never ending stream of awesomeness, SEO and other marketing become difficult.

I've been part of many very wasteful website projects, with dozens of about pages, blog listings, categories, and other nonsense that on their own do not make something worth investing in. Put up as little as you can, make it useful, and focus on marketing what you do to people with the rest of your $.

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#47

Post by mechanical_fish »

dimitar wrote: post #28

If you are that busy, please don't create a Wordpress site with plugins and themes. They are hacked very often - the extensions, php and wordpress itself are vulnerable and have to be updated often to stay safe. Make a simple static website, maybe even a site-builder like wix. Backup your content (the text and pictures) and don't rely too much on trendy graphics - they'll go out of fashion in 2 years anyway.

I used to have a static website, before I wised up and moved to Wordpress like everyone else.

I found that, once I restricted myself to the features of static pages, the security risks of Wordpress were a lot less scary:

- You can't hack form submissions if the site doesn't have any forms on it.

- If you're going to require SSH to publish new pages, you can require SSH tunnels to log in to Wordpress or access any admin pages. (I should write up my nginx config for this.)

- If you were prepared to make every site update require a Git push, you can surely afford to disable WP's very scary self-update-in-place feature and perform WP updates from a development server instead.

- A WP site that could be usefully replaced by a static site is vulnerable... how, exactly? Static sites don't accept credit card numbers. Customers can't even log in, so they won't type in their darkest secrets even if they wanted to. Employees can be told to follow rules like "don't use your Gmail password for the corporate WP site" and "don't type anything into the public publishing engine that would cause an emergency if it were published to the public."

The biggest risk is denial-of-service and defacement. Restore from your tamper-proof offline backups, which you need to have anyway. There are probably fifteen different services you could use to be alerted when the website changes unexpectedly or starts serving up malware.

Of course, static websites are faster. Until you turn on Cloudflare's free plan, which makes everything faster still.

Re: Ask HN: As a busy founder, how to address a website best?

#48

Post by neltnerb »

lauriswtf wrote: post #9

Have you seen Squarespace[0]? It is one of the quickest ways to launch a website. It even lets you register a domain, so it is all-inclusive. [0] - http://www.squarespace.com/

I just wanted to offer an extremely grateful thank you for this suggestion. In the intervening 8 hours, I managed to set up a site, customize it to look decent, and even add all my content. Definitely a huge help, and I'd vote you up times infinity if I could.

Here's the result: http://navolta.com

Post reply on HN