When Cousin Billy Builds Your Website

Budget-conscious companies often turn to a friend or relative to build their Website for free. Someone's daughter, future son-in-law, cousin or personal friend wants to learn how to build Websites and volunteers for the job. The problem is that the Cousin Billy Website is more likely to be a disaster than a success. This disaster makes the company look bad. If you are planning to have Cousin Billy build your organization's Website, improve your chances of success by following these guidelines.

1. Pay Billy $1000 (or at least $500). Why pay Billy when he'll do the job for free? For starters, if you doubt that Billy's work is going to be worth $1,000, then why are you wasting your time and his on the project? Second, if $1,000 seems to you like a lot of money for a Website, your commitment to Website's success is clearly too low. Don't bother getting started.

Another reason to pay Billy is to get the revisions you need. It's hard to hold a guy's feet to the fire when he is, after all, working for free. But if you pay him $1,000 you can have a clear conscience about making him do the work right.

Lastly, pay him in fourths. One fourth up front, one fourth to see the design, one fourth to finish the site and allow you to test it, and the last fourth to launch the site and register it with search engines (which then means more testing).

2. Make sure you choose a professional hosting service. Cousin Billy may think he's doing you a favor by getting you a $9.95 a month Web hosting from Brand X company. Typically that kind of site performs badly. So do a little research of your own and pick a top ten rated Web hosting firm, or select a local firm with a good reputation.

3. Know how to access your own site, and keep a set of site files on your computer. Surprising numbers of businesses we talk to don't know where their site is being hosted, how to access their Website files, or where their back-up files are. Make sure you know.

4. Choose your own domain name. Billy may know html, but that doesn't make him a marketing expert, who's qualified to get you the best Website address. We've seen some pretty dumb domain names selected by Cousin Billy and forced onto ignorant companies. Get domain name advice from sales and marketing professionals.

5. Make sure you know how long Billy's going to be around. If you have questions about the site or need changes a month or a year later, how will you reach Billy? What if he's no longer your daughter's boyfriend? Then what will you do?

6. Judge Billy by the same standards you use for other company work. Just because Billy's working for $10 an hour, don't settle for bad work. If the purpose of your Website is to get more customers, then get half a dozen of your current customers to look at the site and tell you how they like it. Their opinion is more important than your own. Remember that your Website represents your organization's image, world wide.

7. Plan ahead. Once Cousin Billy launches your site, who is going to keep it current? Launching a Website is like getting a dog – it's initially exciting, but dogs, and Websites, need routine care. In some ways, dogs are easier to take care of – they sleep most of the time. Websites are up 24 hours a day. Decide who will revise the site on a regular basis as updates are needed.

8. Test the site with Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and AOL's browser. We know of one company grossing over $1 million a month that thought its Cousin Billy site was just fine. Cousin Billy was looking at the site only with Internet Explorer, and everyone at the company was, too. As it happened, the site had major problems when viewed with Netscape Navigator. The result: millions and millions of people weren't able to use the site well.

9. Ask Cousin Billy what he's going to do about search engine registration. If he says he wants you to do that, then at least you know. We recently met with a company whose Cousin Billy had registered the site with only one of the top ten search engines. If your Website can't be found, then it won't be seen.

10. Tell Cousin Billy to avoid bells and whistles. The Cousin Billys of the world are prone to using flashing lights, blinking images and other gadgets that are often in bad taste and/or dysfunctional. One Cousin Billy Website we saw was built entirely in Flash. Even those people with Flash plugged into their browser had to wait about three minutes for the download before a single page could be viewed.

Follow these guidelines to increase your chances of getting a Website of some actual value for your $1,000. Better yet, use these guidelines to write up an agreement that you and Cousin Billy sign before he gets his first $250 check. You'll be glad you did.

This article first appeared as a column written by Dave Tedlock, NetOutcomes' president, for Inside Tucson Business and/or the New Mexico Business Weekly.

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