BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

There is an interesting article on Small Business Branding blog – “10 Critical Questions To Ask A Web Designer”. The post is wrong on so many accounts, it’s would have been easier to ignore it altogether. However, being a lead to a Zealus web design studio for so many years I can’t help but notice how irrelevant most of these questions are – and here’s why:

1. What skills do you or your team posses? HTML, CSS, Drupal, WordPress, MySQL, PHP, CGI, Ruby on Rails? – author argues that by listening to the white noise the project lead makes while trying to answer your question you will be able to pick something useful. Wrong – you won’t. If he’s technically savvy he (or she, doesn’t matter) will sink you in the sea of gibberish technology talk, and if he’s not – he will sink you even deeper in semi-technology blabber. Point is – you will leave thinking that you have talked to a smart guy while in reality you have learned nothing.
What you should be asking – what’s the technology called, how widespread is it, how mature is it. These are the things you can understand, remember and cross-check after the conversation. What’s important – you will be able to make a business decision based on things you can comprehend.

2. How quickly can you provide a first draft of the site and how long does a job like this normally take? – author argues that such preliminary estimates can help you manage your schedule. Wrong – before signing the contract all dates are so grossly underestimated that you really have to live outside of the reality to base anything but future negotiations on those dates.
What you should be asking – how long projects like these take typically? What are the pitfalls, what could drag the project, how to prevent dragging from happening.

3. What is your working procedure and how will you communicate your progress? – if you are working with freelancers they most likely have no procedure in place and if you have with some established group they will tell you about project status reports even before you have to ask. The reason being that people who’s been around long enough know that if they fail to communicate properly they fail to get paid. So they will make damn sure their client knows all the hard work they put in, they will create a dashboard with tasks, timelines, heck, you might even see Gantt chart!
What you should be asking – what is the phone number of the person responsible for the project. One single person has to be responsible, if there is more than one – walk away.

4. How much support comes with this package deal? – obvious statement that no one works for free is obvious. Make sure you ask this question before negotiations begin, otherwise you can negotiate that sweet low price only to find out that support costs painfully extra. Unless you’re dealing with “Cheap web sites for r$499 per 5 pages” type of designers – there is no point in asking this question aside from the other negotiations.

5. What kind of after support do you offer? – same thing. Best thing to do is negotiate a support contract for some period immediately after launch so you will be covered in case something comes out immediately after your web project is live. In addition to that you might want to get a per-incident support after initial support contract is expired.
What to ask – nothing, keep negotiating.

6. What is your normal procedure if the job does not turn out satisfactorily? – author is then ventures on a journey of how everyone is spoiled by generous refund policies. Well, you just go and try to get a refund from anyone, I just want to watch how easy it would be. Speaking of service contracts, I may not live long enough to see the end of it anyway.
What you should be asking – nothing, just get a copy of the contract BEFORE you sign in and show it to your lawyer. It just another one of those things you want to negotiate as hard as you can. We have actually dropped a number of contracts because we could not successfully negotiate this single point. Everything else was set, but because client wanted a full refund or had some other crazy idea about how he gets all of his money back at the end when he tells us he doesn’t like it – it was dropped. It’s cheaper than a lawsuit anyway.

7. What software or technology will you be using to build my site and will I be able to use and update it myself? – the tragic story of a person who was asking for white noise in question #1 and ended up with useless application without anyone around to support it. That’s the illustration right there why pretty much everything that post is telling you is wrong.
What you should be asking – see question number 1: how widespread this technology, how mature is it. Is is Open Source or is it proprietary (former is better than the latter, unless you’re talking about Flash which is a whole another can of worms altogether).

8. Does it cost extra for this software or does anything you recommend to build this site going to require additional license purchased? – this is the only sane question in the whole ten, however, the justification is flawed nonetheless. As with any contractor, he brings his own tools. If your project lead is a geek he will force you into buying the top-notch hardware and software so that he could play with new shiny toys that he otherwise could not afford. If your project lead is a sales agent she will sell you whatever she will make the most of. Either case – you loose.
What you should be asking – is for a detailed chart of costs, including anything and everything your project needs to be completed successfully. Let your future contractors know that you have such and such assets and if anything needs to be purchased – it has to be put on that chart. Time, licenses, hardware, image and sound rights and royalties – everything goes there. This way you can cross-check with other contractors and actual vendors to see who’s charging you and for what. It’s your money, don’t waste it.

9. We would like the domain name administrator to be in our representative’s name and email. Can you arrange that? – unless you trust your contractor sleep in the bed with your husband (or wife) – never ever even mention this to them. Spend as much time as it requires, but BUY THE DOMAIN YOURSELF! Do not give access to your domain to anyone else, if there are any modifications – learn how to do them yourself or register a domain with registrar who has telephone support – like GoDaddy. You can rebuild the site in months, but rebuilding a reputable brand name, replacing domain that all your customers know can take years.
What should I ask – can you develop on test platform and them move the site to our domain? But any decent developer should do that anyway.

10. Can I see a portfolio of previous sites built. Or is there a demo of a site similar to what you will be building us? – this should be first question that you ask a contractor (designer, programmer or whatnot). Why is it #10 – I have no idea, I guess just to reiterate how much wrong is with initial post. In addition to portfolio (if there is any) you should briefly explain what you are trying to do and how does the designer see it solved. That should be the first thing – before you put anything else on the table.

There are hundreds of accounts of fraudsters using various scam methods for credit card stealing, making fraudulent purchases or selling goods that never arrive at their intended destination. So much so that small businesses were literally forced to incorporate those fraud transactions into cost of doing their business online. Here are a few tips that should help a small business sustain some of the most often tried transactions – purchase with fraudulent credit cards. Some small businesses have this reason alone to choose more expensive credit card processor, like PayPal,  in order to not to deal with fraud themselves, potentially loosing thousands of dollars in revenue. These simple steps may help recover that money given that small business processes credit cards through its own merchant account.

1. Verify shipping vs. billing address. Some web sites even refuse to ship to an address that is different from billing, but that is really up to the business owner. If you sell something that could potentially be a gift, so that one relative can order it for another – pass it on, but if you sell something that people mostly order for themselves, like gadgets or novelties, then shipping address way off from billing might suggest something fishy.

2. Ask yourself – does the order make sense? If you are selling expensive merchandise that people are most likely to buy once in a while – would the order for five items make sense? Call the billing phone number to verify the purchase – it will cost you 2 minutes, but potentially can save you hundreds of dollars.

3. Have the payment cleared yet? Institute shipping and handling policies that will cover your bases while you wait for payment to clear. Sometimes it may take a day or two for payment to go through all the hoops of your payment system, be patient and wait out the whole thing. It may bounce off for a number of reasons, first of which is stolen credit card.

4. Verify the IP address‘s geographic location vs. both shipping and billing. It sounds a bit nerdy at first, but any online shopping cart can be tweaked to display originating IP address along with the order information. The task is to see if the IP address belongs to the same region as the two addresses. An order originating from Eastern Europe’s IP address that has billing address in Connecticut and shipping destination in California is hardly legit. In some cases you won’t be able to tell if the IP address is or is not located where the billing or shipping addresses are, in these cases just move on to #5.

5. Never hesitate to call the bank that have issued credit card. Have your clients enter the 800 number on the back of the credit card along with their billing information. In any doubt – call the bank and have them verify that name, billing and shipping addresses are legit. Some banks even have that option on their initial menu.

Quite often I see the same issue repeating itself over and over again. There’s a small business which operates almost on a shoestring budget. Then there’s a business owner who, out of all things, afraid to move in either direction because it is quite clear to him – one wrong move and he’s out of the money and out of the business. Then employees come into picture and start pressuring business owner for raise, more perks or simply new equipment.

If he concedes – he’s back to the same issue of money shortage. If he refuses – employees become less and less motivated, until it gets to the point where no work is done. Then the business owner has to go through a whole round of cycling the workforce which is as expensive as it is exhausting.

Every small business, once in a while, hits this rock. Almost every business addresses the issue – one way or another. Some survive. Some – not so much. However, the question remains the same – how to keep employees motivated to work on a lower wage than they could have gotten if they looked hard and long enough? How to deter the motivation degradation, that eventually becomes sand in the gears, fifth wheel in the cart and whatever else you can think of that doesn’t help business moving forward.

First thing any business owner should understand is that no matter what is said and done in the company, unless the employee is a managing partner – he would never care about the business as much as the owner. Even more so, any small business that treats its workers with little respect is doomed to have a low motivation problem. Whatever can be stolen – will be stolen. Whatever can be neglected (even at the risk of having an argument with the boss) will be neglected. Employees will constantly be late, leave early, or, if that’s somehow restricted, will slack off during the day.

As an example I will tell the story about one IT department I used to work for some years ago. The company had pretty much any internet activity restricted and forbidden. There were no Facebook back then, but there were chat rooms, dating sites, discussion forums and other perfect methods of spending a day at work without doing any actual work. As any strong medicine this had its side effects. People were unable to find the information they needed. There were no blogs, but there was some technical documentation, newsgroups and forums, where actual meaningful discussion ensued. Ah, those were the good old days. It turned out, IT people spent enormous amounts of time carving multiple workarounds to access the sites they needed. Sites they needed to do their work, mind you, but once you’re breathing the freedom – you want to fully explore it. Having those boundaries not be in place – any worker could have the information he or she needs in minutes and would go back to work. But creating walls around people to make them work harder achieves only one thing – making sure these people will try to traverse these walls as hard as possible – work or no work.

So what does this has to do with motivation? Everything! Given the right motivation people would be willing to sacrifice other things. As an example – the organization above had one of the fastest internet connections at that time, so for any IT geek it was obviously a better place to work. I know, sounds funny, but that was the case.

Many small business owners are too afraid to look deep into their employees. Everybody’s got their reasons, of course, but generally they’re afraid to be met with ignorance. However the case may be, business owners should still try and understand – what drives this person? Why did they choose to work for me? What’s in it for them? Maybe it sounds like a too much of a job – to look into that $10/hour kid, but it may bring back a lot more value. Maybe your business could become a major stepping stone in this kid’s career, so he will be willing to go an extra mile or two for a good reference and valuable experience.

An extra mile or two from every employee in a company totals for a good deal of distance these people are willing to carry your business for free. It isn’t something a business owner should easily overlook – especially one with strained budget.