Nov 5

Written by: Eric Bell
11/5/2008 9:25 PM 

Most small business websites are a set of static HTML pages and most are created and never touched again. They fail to live up the hazy promise that created them and never drive traffic nor increase the bottom line. They are online brochures that age poorly.

Businessman of all size have been sold on the promise of a business website and studies have shown that the promise has been largely unfulfilled. One successful tack has been to pick a simple, doable goal and make the website achieve this. How?

The best goal for a small business website is to pick one business objective at a time and make the website and related technology like email perform their needed functions. But to get a website that can be party to this structure a simple but unobvious 3-step plan is needed. Other articles will cover what to do with a website, this one will explain the 3-step plan.

Step 1 - Convert your static website into a dynamic website

Building a website of static (unchanging) pages and linking pages together so that a user can move from one page to another makes perfect sense but doesn't work! When first created the site is perhaps as perfect a site as it needs to be but things change and surely to tell evolving messages to your prospects and customers the site has to change. Static pages are pages that don't change and require additional programming to make them change. Programming cost is relatively expensive and time consuming. Not necessarily a  lot of time nor cost but relatively costly.

A better situation is a website that has the ability to be changed incrementally by non-programmers, the businessman or one of his employees. The key is a website that is designed well enough with a structure for presenting information and navigation and most importantly doesn't require programmers to make small changes.

How? Move the website to a hosting service that provides a CMS (content management system) as the means to build and present the site. CMS? Yes, CMS. A CMS is a program that runs at the hosting company and builds the web pages on the fly as they are navigated too. Their strength for the businessman is the relative easy to change any or all pages with simple built-in tools to the website.

Polymorph will have a Flash video on this whole process soon, but for now the first step is to move your website to a CMS-based hosting company (we'll help with that selection too later). Once this is accomplished with the help of your original website designer or someone new that you have help you, the next two steps too have to be undertaken.

Step 2 - Make sure your website is backed up and can be restored.

If you take the time and pay for a website, it must be backed up on a regular basis to protect your investment and to reduce your risk of lost revenue should there be a failure of some kind.

As well, if the backup is taking place as planned, you have to know that the backup can be restored. This requires help from whomever performs the backup. You have shown how the backup is made and you have to be shown how the restore is made. Trusting someone whom you've given the responsibility is not enough, you have to see it for yourself. Understand what effort is required, how long it takes, and what it costs. This is just self-survival due dilligence.

Step 3 - Make sure you can take your website with you.

Once you've moved over the static website to a dynamic website (CMS-based) hosting company and you've made sure that your website can be backed up and restored you have to endure that your agreement provides for you to get a copy of the website and that it can be moved to another company.

This is a little complex so let's break this down. First, your dynamic website (CMS-based website) is no longer pages of HTML, its now data in a database at the hosting company. This data is what is backed up and restored and this data is what comprises your website. The goal in this step is to ensure that the CMS you choose is one that is available widely enough to reduce your risk of not getting your investment's worth from the work you've put in and that you can get the data. Your contract with the hosting company has to provide for your ability to take your data and walk away from them. If the contract is silent on this matter, get it written in or find another hosting company where it is written in. Don't count on the hosting company being good, or fair and don't count on them being helpful if the contract doesn't state it.

That's it - 3-steps that don't intuitively make sense to a businessman that runs a hardware store, a car wash, or a bank. The experise of the businessman is anything but computers, website and backups. This plan is the gateway to making the website achieve payback that will be demonstrated in coming articles.

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