So You Want a Website
Getting a website is a key step toward all kinds of important goals, from sharing your creativity to showcasing a business to selling products directly online. There are as many good reasons to own a website as there are businesses, organizations, hobbies, passion projects, and side hustles—in other words, infinite!
Most Website Projects Fail
As good as the intentions behind them may be, the truth is that most website projects end in disaster. There are endless possibilities for failure:
- Business models that are incomplete, unclear, unrealistic, or otherwise doomed from the start.
- Choosing, and finding yourself stuck with, the wrong technology for the job.
- Secretly unqualified developers that over-promise and then deliver either chaos or nothing at all.
- Vastly different proposals and price quotes from different developers, with no way to know who's giving good information.
- Projects that spiral into an endless time and money suck, with no end in sight.
If you've ever had a website built, you should recognize some or all of these problems—because the average web project suffers most of them to a greater or lesser extent.
You know the horror stories, and you might even be in the middle of one yourself. Now, what can we do about it?
You Need to Get Educated
So You Want a Website is a straightforward, nontechnical buyer's guide to owning a website. It walks you through all the key information you must have to give your site a good chance of succeeding, such as:
- The plans you must have in place before you think about paying for a website.
- Why so many web development projects go awry, and what specifically you'll need to be prepared for.
- Common "pitfall" business models to simply walk away from, and why.
- When you don't need a website, and the free alternatives to consider.
- The difference between a website and a web application, how to know you're in over your head on an application-style project, and why there's a 99.5% chance you don't need a mobile app.
- The right and wrong technology choices for your site based on its business model, and what you should expect to pay to have it developed.
- How to evaluate web developers and their proposals, choose a good developer, and work well together.
- Who you'll need to hire (or have in-house) in addition to a developer to make your project work.
- Why 90% of your work on your site will be marketing, not technology, and the fundamentals of how marketing works online.
If you can't write 1,000 words (complete with war stories) on each of the topics above, then we guarantee you need this book. At worst, we can save you months and thousands of dollars in frustration, and at best, we can help you build a web presence that will meet your real-life goals—the ones that are bringing you online in the first place!