Leicesterprise

Web sites for businesses could well become a thing of the past!

I have been producing websites for small businesses since 1997. Now, it looks like they are being made redundant. This is due to the emergence of Web.2. and the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Registering a domain name, designing and building a web site, organising the hosting and maintaining the content is a costly and time-consuming activity. Many people are now claiming that these ‘social networking’ sites are making small, free-standing web sites obsolete. Is this just hype?

As a big user of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and of course blogs, I have seen for myself just how valuable these utilities have been. Having used them all, I have seen a huge growth in traffic to one of the web sites I run. I wouldn’t say they have replaced the need for a web site, but they have proven to be very valuable at complementing my web site and driving traffic to it.

I have seen people using apps like WordPress and Joomla as solutions to the need for a DIY web presence, with varying degrees of success. I guess that businesses that have gone down this road have saved themselves a great deal of money.

Web design has been (and still is) a technical skill. Many people believe that they have the skills to be successful web designers but I still regularly find appallingly bad web sites. Home made web sites tend to be poorly constructed because there are so many aspects to web design you cannot learn on your own. There are many courses that teach people how to use things like ‘Dreamweaver’ but don’t teach the basic technical requirements of good website design practice.

Another thing that successful business sites need is success in the search engines. Over recent years we have seen the rapid growth of experts offering “search engine optimisation”. So, many a poor business person has spent a couple of thousand pounds or dollars or euros having a web site made, only to be presented with another bunch of bills for optimising it for Google and other search engines.

So, why didn’t the web designers build in optimisation in the first place? It stems back, in my view, to the lack of professional standards and training in the industry. Any kid can download a copy of Dreamweaver or Front Page and start making web sites. They don’t go on courses. Some might read online courses. The end result is a site that fails miserably to meet any of the design standards you might expect of professional and experienced designers.

So will we see the end of small web sites? Quite possibly. People will become more and more expert in the art of the Tweet, the craft of using Facebook and the science of blogging. These applications can work a lot faster and more effectively that the old HTML page.

Footnote: Experts are claiming that by 2012, there will be more mobile devices than PCs. More and more people will access the WWW by something other than a laptop or desk top computer. That means that we all have to re-learn what web sites are all about.

In my seminar I will be presenting case studies of how I have successfully used social networking sites to work alongside one of my web sites and the results have been very rewarding.

Details of the course are available from the Well of Living site