The Perils of Small Business Website Design

Why would anybody hire an outside party for their small business website design? Just think of all the fun you’re missing by not building the site yourself:

* The joy of having to learn 20 languages and technologies just to build one web page. These days, you have to master HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, RSS, Javascript, Java, Flash, AJAX, PHP, and ASP just to barely stay even by the skin on your nose.

* The fun of making it cross-browser compatible. Look at all these cool web technologies we have! Oh, you want it to look the same in any browser? Then you’re stuck back in 1992, with six sizes of header and a blink tag. By the way, the various software companies are trying as hard as they can to break compatibility by 1992 standards as well, but it’s very difficult to make each browser mutually incompatible with every single other browser’s implementation of every single tag all at the same time. They have research labs working on this problem.

* The thrill of considering cross-system compatibility as well. Did you know that there is a small group of maniacs running loose out there who are still running WebTV? That people expect your page to load on an iPhone and a Sony PlayStation Portable? That somebody out there still uses Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5-point-something? Somebody’s still using the “OS/2″ operating system - apparently it can access the Internet?

Oh, no, by all means, do it yourself! Don’t go through a small business website design company and miss out on the adventure of coding it all yourself.

Resources

After all, you can always pick up some small business website design templates, fresh from somebody’s copy of Microsoft Frontpage Express 1.0 done on Windows ‘95 and just right for making your site look like it got into a tussle with MySpace.com and lost.

Yes, free templates are the first step in affordable website design. Small business web hosting companies offer to hook you right up with some free-bee design templates right off the bat, and will gift your web strategy with a hefty discount. Small business website design has always thrived on these popular templates, which are every bit as current as a Ford Country Squire station wagon with woody side-panels.

Next, go get yourself some animated gifs. Gotta spice up that site with all kinds of moving, bouncing, blinking, scurrying, gyrating graphical goodness, and what better way than a batch of free-to-download gifs that have been hanging around since the days of the Commodore 64? For the truly full service small business website design, don’t forget an animated background and a music MIDI file that loads without giving you an opt-out!

Usability

Ideally, in order to comply with the standard guidelines for home-made website usability, your site should feature:

* A Flash splash! The Flash file should be at least 100 MBs and be throttled through 10kbps bandwidth. Offer no way to opt out, forcing every visitor to watch the entire movie on every visit.

* Offer no clue as to how to get around the site; links should just be scattered here and there, ideally with just an inscrutable graphic symbol with no text label. Be sure to make every bit of hypertext be different from the defaults - that’s why there’s defaults, so you know what to change it from.

* Be impossible to read. We like magenta text on a glaring red background, but other eyeball-melting combinations include electric-blue-on-purple, white-on-urine-yellow, brown-on-ash-black, and moldy-green-on-sky-blue. Bonus points for making everything blink and scroll, even if you have to use java to do it.

* Media, media, media! There should be at least three videos which start playing at top volume the moment every page loads, indifferent to the background MIDI music that’s already playing. Be sure to throw in some banner ads that talk and yell at the user, too. You don’t want your visitor to feel lonely, do you?

In the end, it should be obvious that website designs for small business is a piece of cake! Anybody can do it, even if they’ve never used a computer before. There’s a whole “industry” composed of “professional” web designers out there, but what do they know? All they know is how to make boring old sleepy pages that don’t get any attention. They just want your money, when you can do it yourself for free and end up with a product that looks, acts, and feels like it’s worth every penny!

A video on small business website design, which unfortunately is missing my wisdoms bad: