When Not to Cut Corners in Business
Mar 21st, 2008 by admin
I’ve done a few articles in recent months on ways to save money when running a small business (or any business for that matter). Opting for used furniture, choosing an online printer and outsourcing can help keep some of that green in your pocket. But after spending some time online last night researching the phenomenon known as ‘Social Knowledge’ (the best example is WikiAnswers – www.wiki.answers.com), something became very clear… There are some areas where you should not cut corners or try to go it alone.
- The first area is your Web site. Please, for the love of a good user experience and visitor sanity, don’t take the do-it-yourself approach unless you really know what you are doing. Your Web site often serves to create that critical first impression. A cluttered, poorly designed and slow running ‘canned’ site is a major turnoff. If you’re worried about the expense of having one created, consider hiring a freelancer through Guru (www.guru.com) or eLance (www.elance.com).
- Second, don’t use your home phone as a dual purpose business phone. Invest in a separate phone line or consider using an online service such as Skype (www.skype.com) or Google’s Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com) service (which a very dear friend just pointed out to me).
- Finally (although there are other areas where investing a little more pays off), never ever take on the mentality that insurance isn’t needed. If you are offering a product or service to the public, you are always at risk. And something to keep in mind… a general business liability policy only protects you against some liabilities. You may require additional insurance such as Errors and Omission – which covers acts that are deemed ‘negligent.’
Good points, Crystal!
About point #1: for most novice IBOs, I’ve found that nothing beats the comprehensive features of Site Build It!.
I say this because most individual entrepreneurs would be ill-advised to welcome the inherent challenges of outsourcing the creation of that first web site. Dealing with an external web creator (lag-time, creative differences) and the complexities of traffic generation (SEO) can actually prove counter-productive for the individual entrepreneur.
SiteBuildIt! is an advanced, comprehensive solution for this problem in that it handles all the technical facets of creating and maintaining a SE-friendly web site while simultaneously guiding the IBO through the process of what should be their number one focus on the web: creating quality site content.
Forgive me if I sound like and “Ad” here; it’s just that I’m convinced this is the preferred option for those who don’t already have a steady, growing stream of incoming customer contact.
Just my 1.2 cents (adjusted downward for inflation). (c:
Skype is an excellent idea for a cheap phone solution. I just set up my business phone line for the year using skpe and the total fixed cost was $30 (for Skype Pro) + $26 (for SkypeIn service).
For websites, I’m not so sure if going it alone is a bad idea. With careful design research and a basic sense of what you want to accomplish it is possible for a computer literate person to create a simple and effective website. Using open-source software like Gimp (for Graphics) and possible open-source E-commerce packages like ZenCart & OScommerce make it even less expensive and easy. If you really don’t want to do it yourself, it might be worthwhile to try bartering with other business owners to see if anyone would like to use your service in exchange for website help.
If you have a winning concept, it is usually worthwhile to pay a designer for custom work. Your website is your calling card on the internet, and like this article suggests, the first impression is very important.
For years, I tried giving away free website evaluations to business owners as a way to market my consultancy. I broke the evaluation down into several categories which included usability issues, coding issues and visual issues. Wherever possible I used objective criteria for evaluating the site, although certain points required a subjective opinion. I also gave a pass/fail type evaluation of the overall effectiveness of the site.
There were occasionally websites that were outstandingly good. There were frequently sites that were good enough to be passable but needed some improvement - but those sites were usually not DIY sites.
It was rare that a DIY site did not have at least one category in which it ranked poor on a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor.
Unfortunately, if you do not know something about web design it is easy to end up with an alleged website designer or developer who uses outdated code (such as tables layout) or uses frames or produces coding errors in tidy.
There are also too many alleged designers who are using tools for people who do not know the first thing about HTML or CSS or XML.
At the time that I checked the site recommended by Carlos, there were several coding errors on its home page. These included several misplaced tags, a missing alt attribute and the use of a tag which is not approved by the W3C.org consortium.
It also promotes itself as being a tool for starting a web design business when you don’t know how. Many web designers use tools other than text editors, but your designer should know how to REWRITE the code in a text editor because even the best tools occasionally make mistakes in coding.