Staying Alive
The struggles of a business trying to survive.
In the summer of 2013 I wrote a post about whether it was time to revamp my website. Ultimately, I decided I should, and more than a year later, that project is now complete.
In my next few posts, I plan to explain how I approached my upgrade: defining my goals for the project, choosing the web developer and aligning the site content with our operational capabilities. One post will give you an opportunity to see the new site, which is not yet open to the public, and comment on what you think works and what doesn’t.
If your business is like mine, your website is your store. It’s the first piece of information that prospective clients encounter about you. Whatever you put up will make a huge difference in whether your business succeeds or fails. My project took longer than anticipated — and cost more — but I’m happy (so far) with what has been built.
Before I start, I should note that the previous generation of my site, introduced in late 2009, was conceived in a desperate moment for my company, a furniture maker specializing in large conference and boardroom tables. Back then, during the worst of the recession, I had little money to spend and I was too distracted by the day-to-day struggle for survival to devote much time to the project. So I confined my search for a developer to a very select group: anyone who happened to both do web design and play poker with me on the third Friday of every month. Surprisingly, this presented me with three candidates.
In January 2009, a couple of hours into a game, I announced to my pals that I was looking for help. Two of them gracefully declined, telling me that I couldn’t afford them. The third accepted and did a very nice job.
The website he developed was built around three concepts:
1) The site should be about the product and not about the company.
2) The site should be easy to update, without need for me to contact the web developer
3) The site should contain pricing information whenever feasible and allow users to generate an instant quote on a custom table, without registration or interaction with my sales team.
My experience with that site has been positive, but I have reason to make changes. I still think the focus should be on our product, but we need to do a better job highlighting our client list and building a brand. Our back end, a proprietary content management system that was pretty slick in 2009, is now hopelessly obsolete. I still want site viewers to be able to see our pricing, but the instant quote feature does not fit with our current sales methods.
I also thought it might be time to stop managing my Google AdWords campaigns by myself. I’ve been the sole manager of my campaigns since 2005. During the last decade, AdWords has become considerably more complex. I’m probably above average for self-taught users, but I’m at a stage in my business life where I recognize the value of good outside advice and I have the resources to pay for it. I’ve benefited from letting outsiders contribute to my company in accounting, sales and operations. It’s time to see what will happen if I get help with marketing.
Since my business has been doing much better than it was in 2009, and I am no longer swamped with minute-by-minute operational responsibilities, I decided that my poker-game decision process could be improved as well. To that end, I put on my big-businessman pants and did something I had never done before: I wrote a request for proposals.
I tend to work with companies that I know or that have been recommended to me by someone I trust. Soliciting multiple bids for projects just hasn’t been worth the time and effort. When I searched the Internet for “sample RFP,” the results I found were daunting — long, complex and difficult to read. Because I have some ability to convey my thoughts on paper, I decided to write my own from scratch. Here is a link to it, and I’ll summarize:
There are four sections. I started with an introduction, including a link to our current site, our AdWords budget and a breakdown of traffic sources. The next section was called “Things I Like About the Current Site.” The third part, “Things I Want to Change,” included my problems with the current site and a wish list of possible upgrades, including responsive design and the ability to add e-commerce functions in the future.
I also included a target budget: $25,000, with the qualification that I was willing to spend more if there were a good reason to do so. And I concluded that section with a request that the project be completed within 120 days of selection. I do have a functioning site, and I’d rather let everyone take the time to get a good result.
The last section was titled “Your Response.” It consisted of this challenge:
Show me a site you made that sells something.
Show me a site you made with a database of products.
Show me a client that uses AdWords to drive traffic.
Show me a site you made where search engine optimization tactics are relevant.
Show me a site you made with e-commerce built in
Show me a responsive site of your design.
I concluded with my contact information.
Armed with this document, my next step was to find some web design firms to send it to. I decided that I would send it to a group of prospective vendors that I would find through Google. I could have asked fellow business owners for recommendations, but one of my goals was to find a designer who also understands search engine optimization.
To that end, seeing who tops the list of results for the search string “Philadelphia Web Designers” would tell me who has a good grasp of S.E.O. It would also, I hoped, turn up local companies. I prefer to work with people face to face when I can, and I thought that having the designers visit the shop to see what we do would help them make a site that shows our process to its best advantage.
Next: Choosing a web designer.
Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.