Building a business website, ideas?

[This post written during hardcore sleep deprivation.]

In general you need to hire three different people. One designer, one programmer, and one search engine optimisation guy.

There are lots of companies that will tell you they can do all of it as a package. I suggest not using them – firstly because almost no shops do all three well, and secondly because you’re immediately paying project management fees on top of the actual work.

Instead, find three guys and manage the project yourself. The basic steps are:

  • Define functionality (in concert with the programmer)
  • Define user experience (in concert with the designer)
  • Make a skeleton roadmap for future development, to give the programmer a chance of making it easy for when the time comes.
  • Get the designer to put a general site template together
  • Give it to the programmer and get him to make the content work
  • Send the results back to the designer to tailor the individual pages
  • Throw it all to the SEO guy to fiddle with keywords and stuff
  • Wait six months to a year before his fiddling has any effect

For hosting, I strongly recommend getting a virtual dedicated server, rather than crappy hosting space. A dedicated server gives you far more flexibility and control, makes backups easier, and allows you to run as many websites / email servers / anything else as you like. I use Tummy. They’re more expensive than most for the bandwidth and space they offer, but their support is top notch - you can get instant support over IRC from their head tech guy, who has code in the Linux kernel and really knows his shit.

I can also recommend a few designers and programmers if you like - PM me. Again, they’ll be more expensive than most of the quotes you get, but cheap code in particular is a horrific false economy.

Overkill Brendon, unless you have a big budget to put into a project. And why re-invent the wheel with more custom progamming when you can get almost all the functions you need now with opensource (free) components. (Im talking about ecom, elearning, search, etc. things i listed previously (and many functions i didn’t mention as well).

Your advice is good if you are thinking about a big value commercial site such as financial site that has to grab updated stock data or airline ticketing data or something like that.

Once you dive into custom programming you always have to deal with two big issues, cost and dependancy of others, sometime dependancy on even an individual programmer who may be the only one that knows the ins/outs/why something was coded a certain way. This can even be for small things such as changing a image or text. That is why a CMS package is useful, it is menu driven and allows non-programmers to be able to change the website on their wim.

I agree that a dedicated virtual server is a good idea for some bigger services such as what i metioned, but for SME, a virtual hosting company is suffice. (difference being that in a virtual server, one server (in theory) is dedicated only for your use. A virtual hosting server hosts many websites. ~Which works fine if the datacenter they have setup has a big datapipe and fast servers. Most do, it is easy to find out. I think a better way to do it is go with a virtual host first, then upgrade later if necessary. Most hosting companies offer both types of services, so it is very east to make the switch. (price for virtual servers is usually around $40-$50 a month). just my humble opinion.

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Custom programming doesn’t necessarily mean a big budget, especially if you’re working with individual contractors rather than ripoff “consulting” companies. I agree the initial cost will certainly be higher than using something like Joomla, though.

On the other hand, sites built with the big CMS systems always look and feel like, well, sites built with CMS systems. They pretty much force you to run your site (and therefore, often, your business) a certain way, which is exactly like everyone else’s. And if at some point you need functionality the CMS doesn’t provide, it often costs far more than it would with a custom solution that took account of your needs from the word go.

Cost and dependency are certainly issues. I should mention that almost all programmers are wildly overpriced, and suck. There are a few around who charge reasonable prices and write good, documented, unit-tested, maintainable code, that other people can go into later and do stuff with. Hence my offer to recommend some - they’re hard to find. Programming is a really crappy industry in general.

As for hosting … a virtual dedicated server isn’t an actual physical box dedicated to you. It’s a small part of a big server which is just pretending to be an independent system. I pay $25/mo for mine.