How to create a great website, pt 2: Gathering team April 23

Websites are built up from a number of different bricks. By the end of the day you'll need design, content (texts and pictures), promotion and some technical things like website address, hosting and system for managing content. But most of all you need to get it done. You need decisions, not discussions.

Don't gather a large team just to wash off your responsibility. Don't waste time writing content for weeks, designing for months.

Build your site quickly, don't try to be perfect. In timely world, there's no need to polish every detail. Just get it done. Publish your site on day one even if it's still small and imperfect. Thereby your site starts serving visitors on day one. You get into the business on day one.

Decide alone, don't wait for anyone to miraculously appear with better decisions from the sky. Don't distract your clear thinking with doubts. People never agree with each other anyway.

Recruit only the best to give you great advice. But do not share decision making with them. Democracy sucks in web creation. Great advisors are another story. Listen to them, get your basics right. And then shoot. Do it. Move on.

As Seth Godin puts it, firing the committee is the deal braker. They also say that camel is a horse designed by a committee.

Should I grab a ready-made design or hire a designer?

Design is classically a luxury item. People die of heart attack when invoice from the design agency arrives. But the market has gone through a major diversification. There is no need to have this choice of "to have a design or not to have it" anymore. You can always have a great design. Prices range from completely free designs (templates) to super expensive works, built exclusively for you by industry's best boys.

The question is therefore only about the size of your budget. Most of us have a meager budget if any, but we still want to have a unique design for our sites. If one really can't stand having a standard template and your budget really is low, there might still be a chance. There's a golden middle way -- hire a freelancer who is good both at design and coding. Let him individualize a free template for your site. Should be a half day's work.

Who should do the writing?

You can't have a content downloaded from a content stock for free. That is the hard part -- you need to write the texts yourself or hire someone to do it. Good news is that simple, short, to-the-point texts work best. So most of us can get it done well enough. And don't forget the pictures. Pictures of your team, product, office or anything else illustrating your message.

What to do with the technical stuff?

Binding the design and content together and launching it as your website used to require a lot of assistance from IT guys. Domain names, hosting, PHP, CMS and other creepy acronymes.

By today, this has become the easy part. There is no need for getting your hands oily anymore. You can build your site by yourself with different website building services. No need to distract your neighbour's 10-year old IT guy of-a-son. Build it yourself, it's rather simple. If you have a custom design, let the designer integrate it with that service.

Promotion

Question about how to man the promotional boat to carry your newborn website is more about general business philosophy than about building a great website.

To cut it short -- study the basics of online marketing. Need for it comes along with every website that wants to live. Study how to get better position in Google's search results, how to analyze your traffic, how to spread the word and how + when to advertise. And then either bootstrap and do the work yourself or if it really isn't your cup of tea, find someone to do it. A website likely becoms a failure without promotion.

Other stories on creating a great website:

• April 20th: Introduction
  
• April 23rd: Gathering team
• April 30th: Writing content
• May 7th: Creating design
• July 14th: Building functionality
• July 21st: Increasing traffic