50% of small businesses have invisible web sites …

How much did your web site cost you? And what is hosting it each month costing?

I ask this because I have spent the past few weeks poring through 842 sites owned by Business Warriors. (My wonderful clients.) It’s a dirty job because a few of these sites haven’t had their oil changed since 1995. I did a quick calculation to work out the kind of money that these sites represented. Lets say about R3000 each to set up (very conservatively), and about R100/month each to host (also conservatively).

Over the past three years this totals (wait for it) – ((842 * 3000) + (842 * 3* 12 * 100)) = R5,557,200 – which is an awful lot of money.

Was it worth it?

That’s the question that stuns me! They don’t know.

Imagine that you’re an 18 year old female Varsity student. You take your old (six previous owners) VW CitiGolf for a service. Later in the day you collect the car. How do you know that your CitiGolf has actually been serviced?

You could check the oil to see that it’s clear. (How do I do that? A car needs oil?) You could check a sparkplug to see that it isn’t coated with corrosion and burnt carbon. (Eccch! I am not putting my hands in there. What’s a sparkplug anyway?) You could check the airfilter, the radiator, the brakefluid container, the brakepads, or any one of a range of things.

You don’t do any of these things because you don’t know much about cars, and don’t want to know about them. Your way of measuring the job that the mechanic did is quite simple. If the car survives until the next service, he must have done a good job, surely?

Welcome to the world of web development. No sparkplugs here. No oil either – just a little HTML guaranteed to deter the most determined investigator. (HTML is the name of the tribe of little people that carry the words down the Internet pipes as fast as they can swim, which is pretty darn amazing if you ask me.) No airfilters – just Javascript (makes the pages even prettier) and maybe a little Flash (which is a kind of digital bling).

The bottom line is that most of us start out by telling a developer that we want a site “like that one” – “that one” being an all-dancing, all-singing, Spielberg extravaganza. When said developer suggests a tentative price (equal to the production budget for Titanic) we ask how much it would be if we leave off the airfilter, brakes, and downsize the engine. The number can still be quite startling, but hey we’re running a business here and you gotta spend money if you want to make money – and this Carruthers oke has been telling us since 2000 you gotta be on the web or else face penury.

So, when your dealer delivers your new commercial vehicle, how do you know if your site works? Simple. You look at it. You kick a tyre, open the bonnet for a brief second and sit in all the seats. Nothing breaks. You pay your money and you head off West in search of them thar gold-bearing hills.

Which is what most of the Warriors did – business owners like you and me. Nice people. My friends.

At least they’ll be my friends until this weekend, at which point I have to tell 800 of them that their websites don’t work. Those 800 websites are so invisible they might as well not exist. At least that would save R100 or so each month.

Why don’t the websites work?

I am glad you asked. You wouldn’t set up a shop with all the relevant expenses, then paint the windows bright orange so nobody could see inside, hide the door so nobody could find it (or worse, keep it locked) – would you? And would you keep an unlisted number, or stay out of the Yellow Pages, and never advertise?

And that, dear fellow traveller on this fascinating business experience, is the physical equivalent of what my friends have done in cyberspace. I started looking further afield, at a few UK sites to see if they were any different. Nope! (Although the costs are a lot higher in the UK, the wastage is about the same.)

This weekend I will be giving every web site owning Warrior a 10 page website audit (in English words of one syllable) that will tell them exactly why nobody comes to their websites – and what they can do about it.

And they don’t have to just take my word for it. I will back it up with a few simple Google shortcuts in which Google will show them exactly what Google sees when it looks at their sites.

(One out of every ten Warrior sites being checked by Google has the windows painted and the door locked . Google cannot get in to find out what they do.) What Google sees is pretty critical if you want the world’s biggest search engine to find your business when somebody is looking for the stuff you sell or do.

So, can I invite you to give me some work this weekend? Join the Warriors before end of day Thursday – and I will tell you what your site really is worth right now. And I will tell you how to fix it. And over the next few months I will tell you how you can start making money with the site you have right now – no matter how bad it is. Your investment is R200/month for as long as you think I am adding value.

(The worst site I have ever seen – ever – is the only industrial door company with a strange name that operates in a tiny village in the UK. Their site cost R10,000 and is a marvel of movement and sound. If you search for “industrial doors” and the village name – you will not find the company. Their developer is that good! (A few Warriors have sites that come pretty close, however.)