Brilliant Thinking

A website is about far more that just look and feel. It has to serve two distinct groups of users – your [potential] customers and your business. This is a very important distinction that is often overlooked by many website owners and website developers, because if your website fails to meet the needs of these groups of users, then your website will fail to deliver the results it has been built to achieve - whether these are greater sales, more leads, better customer service, or whatever the principle reason for the site happens to be (for now, we’ll assume that this key goal has already been identified, but that can be a lengthy process in itself).

In this series, we’ll look at the 7 key building blocks that make up a great website. All of these areas need to be reviewed in any website build to make sure that the right website is architected to meet the needs of your customers and your business, which are aligned with the business goal of the site. These 7 building blocks are:

• The User Interface
• Graphic Design
• The Site Engine
• Hosting
• Infrastructure
• Marketing, and
• Maintenance

By looking at each building block in the context of your business goals, your customers and your business, the best website solution can be determined which provides the best return on investment at your current stage in your business development.

Consumers agreed with this sentiment, with an overwhelming 95% stating that they are more likely to trust a small business that uses a professional web url and associated e-mail address. They expressed their suspicion of entrepreneurs trading on free e-mail addresses, such as hotmail or yahoo.

“The internet now plays a critical role in most consumers’ decisions to purchase or hire a service,” said Rodger Armstrong, from Easily.co.uk. “It’s great to see that small businesses and tradesmen are increasingly realising that having a professional website is vital to their business.

There are a myriad of providers of low cost hosting and email, and it is relatively easy to acquire and use a professional web and email address. However, as much as the availability is there, there are still many, many small businesses trading on free or their home ISPs email addresses. It seems that many of the small web companies and freelancers who have been working with the small businesses are not advising them fully so that they present a professional face to the rest of the world.

This world-view fits in with our Internet Maturity Model. The 5 stages of growth show the stages of maturity that companies go through when adopting Internet technolgies, starting with email at the base level, and evolving through professional website design, and then embracing e-commerce, integrated business systems, and even creating new models of working. Although companies are following this maturity curve, consumers may be a little slower to adopt the same mindset. It seems from the British Chamber’s article that consumers are now at “Level 2″ on the model, but this has broader implications as any system they interact with on the web needs to be professional to build trust, and that means the Level 3, 4, and 5 systems too.

As a bootnote for small businesses on a shoe string, you can get set up on the web with a professional website quite easily. There are numerous web template sites on the Internet offering professional templates for a few tens of dollars. You can then customise them yourself, or get a developer to do it for you. This takes the hassle out of trying to figure out how to do all the individual bits and makes it easy to get online with a professional site quickly. (If you are interested in this service, please contact us.)

Even if you adopt the DIY approach, remember to get a professional site, a good domain name and use the email address at that domain (and not your local ISP or a free account). You will gain so much more credibility as a business in the eyes of your customers as a result.

Link: British Chambers of Commerce Article

In a word - no (but your license costs are certainly cheaper).

While that may sound odd on the surface since most open source software is freely available for download under GPL (GNU Public License), many people conveniently forget that they need to spend time installing, configuring and customising the system to get it to do what they need it to for their business. For the technically competent, this is OK, but it still takes time and requires ongoing maintenance as new releases are made by the open source development team. And time costs money. For the non-technically minded, a contractor or web agency is required to do this work for you, which will incur a fee. So, just because you can download something for free doesn’t mean that it actually is “free”. As the old saying goes - “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.

As with any project, the selection of a product or piece of technology to meet the business needs should always be carefully thought out. Start with a list of the requirements that are needed (brainstorm them and write them ALL down). Then prioritise them; we use the MoSCoW system from the Dynamic Systems Development Methodology (DSDM), but you can use whichever system you prefer. Once you have a list of prioritised requirements you can start looking for products, both commercial and open source, that fit your needs, and assess whether the system will actually do the job you need it to. If you don’t have the time or desire to conduct a vendor analysis, companies like ours can help you specify and identify your system requirements.

UPDATE 8th July 2004:An article in a similar vein:
The Myth of Open Source

UPDATE 17th August 2004:
There is an excellent report published by Forrester Research looking at the total cost of ownership of Linux and Windows systems, so you don’t just have to take my word for it One of the key points that comes out of this paper, and many others like it on the Internet, is that the set-up costs of Linux/Open Source systems is generally lower, but the ongoing maintenance costs are usually higher, and so any initial savings are repaid in the longer term.

The Costs And Risks Of Open Source - Forrester Research (325Kb, PDF)

Full Article: July 2005 Web Server Survey

Netcraft: A gain of 2.76 million hostnames from June is the second-largest monthly increase in the history of Netcraft’s survey, as 2005 continues to shape up as a historic year for Internet growth. The only larger gain was a 3.3 million hostname increase in March 2003, which ended months of stagnation and kicked off 30 consecutive months of positive growth for the Web.

Two of the key factors influencing the growth are the increasing use of the web by small businesses as professional websites and online stores become more affordable, and the explosive growth of weblogs, both personal and business focused.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) — An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said.

Full story on CNN: http://us.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/06/28/pakistan.internet.reut/index.html