Do you enjoy reading mission statements?

How about “welcome to our website” messages? Photos of jigsaw puzzles and handshakes?

No?

That’s weird, because if we’re to learn from the examples set by our small business peers, this stuff is the friggin cat’s pajamas. Why would anybody do this stuff if nobody wanted to see it?

Because they suck, that’s why. And if you don’t want to suck too, here are ten things you probably shouldn’t do on your website.

1. Flash-driven design

Oooh – it moves!

I would have liked to think a few years ago that I wouldn’t be including this as the first item in such a list, but I guess some things improve a little slower than we’d like.

Let’s get this straight: Flash-driven design kills your search engine visibility. That means Google won’t love you. Google won’t even see you. Not even if you do your hair just right and wear your skinny jeans.

Not convinced? Jakob Nielsen, maybe the foremost usability expert in the world, says Flash is 99% bad. Think you’re home building website is in that good 1%? Lovely thought, but no. Not only are you shitting on Google’s head, but also the heads of your users. And that’s foul.

2. The Flash intro movie

This is the retarded cousin of the full-Flash website.

“Hey, what if we had our logo come in from somewhere off in the distance, really slowly…and then, once it’s fully visible, we’ll have the words, ‘integrity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘experience’ fly across…then we’ll-” STOP IT!

How long do you think you’ve got to grab you user’s attention? Hint: it isn’t 2 minutes. More like 10 seconds.

Most people won’t wait for your intro movie to play. They’ll either skip it or leave. So do your users, and yourself, a favor and ditch the idea.

3. “Welcome to our website”

This is another thing that should have gone the way of the pog but still seems to be clinging like crap on a yak.

People don’t like to read much online. They just don’t. So most of your copy? They’re going to scan it (if you’re lucky).

Why do you want to squander an already-tiny attention span on a headline with a central goal of reminding people where they are. You’re begging for a “no shit” response.

Unless your design is completely ass-backwards, people should have some idea of where they are just from glancing at the top of the site – where your logo and, ideally, a tagline or short description of your business should be.

4. We-speak

“We operate a fleet of vehicles…”

“Our team of experts is trained in…”

“We are certified to work on…”

Listen: nobody cares.

Your users are interested in the answer to one core question: what’s in it for me?

If your content doesn’t answer this question in short fashion, you fail. End of story.

5. Saying too little

OK, so we know people don’t particular enjoy reading website content.

But the idea isn’t to shut up entirely and communicate with hieroglyphics or vague statements like, “we create business solutions.”

Get direct about what you do, especially the value you provide, and tell the story of how you help your customers.

This isn’t a resume cover letter where you need to herald your achievements and qualities (nobody reads those either). This is your one chance to get through to a human being on the other end who may need, or want, what you can provide. Speak to them openly about what you’re offering, and give them the information they need (like social proof) to make their decision.

Give them a clear call to action, and then shut up.

6. Content that ignores search traffic

No, SEO is not the goal of content – but it’s a nice by-product if you do things right.

If you don’t do any keyword research before you start creating your content, you’re ignoring an opportunity to tap into the language your market uses to describe their problems (and the solutions they have in mind).

The language you use to describe what you do doesn’t matter when it comes to marketing. You’ve got to use the language your customers use.

When you do this right, the content on your pages matches the keywords your customers use to search. Then you’ve got a fighting chance to show up in the search results in front of people who need your stuff.

7. Overly-technical content

Similar to above, when you’re engrossed in technical work every day your language can start sounding like Klingon to the rest of us.

When you talk about your business the way your industry trade journals do, watch for the blank stare.

“We’re experienced in flux capacitor repair and carry top-of-the-line moisture evaporators…”

Yeah, that’s right, I just combined Back to the Future and Star Wars in one lame joke.

Does it really matter to you what’s technically involved in what your plumber does to make the poop go away like it’s supposed to?

You may love the technical side of your work, but if your language goes over your users’ heads you’ll lose them. They already will read only 20% of the copy on your page – do you want that 20% to be words they don’t understand?

8. No clear call to action

Once you’ve answered the question, “what’s in it for me” (see #4 above), your work moves to answering another question: “what do I do now?”

Nothing loses a user faster than the lack of a clear call to action.

And including your address and phone number somewhere in your footer does not qualify.

Big, beautiful and shiny buttons work best. The point is to make it obvious.

It isn’t that your users can’t figure it out by looking around. They’re smart people. The problem is, every one of us is a lazy bastard when it comes to web browsing. Make us work or think, and we get spiteful and leave. We could figure it out, but we won’t.

9. Zero inbound links or promotion

OK this one strikes a particular chord in me.

I help small businesses get more targeted web traffic (primarily through search engines). And many of the people who come to me have no idea that getting traffic can often be more work than building the website.

There is no such thing as a good “location” online. There’s no foot traffic. Nobody is going to happen upon your website – they have to be pointed to it.

If you take no steps to promote your website, and attract no links to it from other websites, you’ll flounder around in a tepid pool of nobody-loves-us.

Part of marketing online involves actually spreading the word (I know, novel concept). Having a nice looking website is a fine start, but if you want anybody to see the thing need a strategy for building links and attention.

10. Hiding your people

Who works for you?

Do they matter?

If you don’t think so, you’re probably a shitty boss. Hit yourself.

If they matter, why don’t you give them faces on your website?

One of the few advantages of being a small business is the close-knit, quirky personality that lends personality to your marketing (if you let it).

People want to hire other people they like. So let your people shine.

What kind of sad mistakes do you see small businesses making on their websites? Share in the comments.

All marketers tell stories.

Stories are how we convince people to take that leap of faith – to give us their attention, subscribe to our content and, ideally, buy from us at some point.

That may sound a little slimy and manipulative until you consider that not everyone who tells stories is making stuff up.

Third Tribe Marketing* is about telling the true story of the benefits brought on by what you’re selling in a compelling and transparent way.  It’s about teaching and providing value first, asking for the sale second.

The truth is that many marketers are charlatans, and online, where there’s still some anonymity, the gloves are off. If you’ve had any naive Utopian notions of the world a few years on the web will clear that up quite nicely.

How many “systems” for making money online have you come across?

How many of them do you think work?

Truly reliable methods for online marketing success are scarce. And there’s a good reason for that.

Scarcity begets value

Alchemy was the study of the transmutation of metals.

Think of it as a cross between blacksmithing, chemistry and witchcraft.

Most alchemists were trying to find the Philosopher’s Stone – a technique that would turn basic metals like lead into pure gold. This went on for some 2,500 years.

Since most guys were working with metal, some alchemists turned their focus to less obvious materials.

Like pee.

Hennig Brand was a German alchemist. And rather than try to create gold from lead or another metal (others had tried), Hennig focused his efforts on urine.

Hennig spent years working with urine. Letting it sit, combining it with other ingredients, heating it – it’s hard to imagine he had much of a social life.

Long story short: sorry kids, you can’t make gold from pee. Put away the measuring cups. (Though it did turn out you can make phosphorous.)

But what if Hennig had succeeded? What if he found a way to turn pee into gold? Wouldn’t he and his benefactors be rich beyond all imagination?

Maybe for a minute.

What the whole idea of turning something cheap and abundant, like pee, into gold misses is the fact that as soon as you take away the scarcity you take away the value.

In other words, you can’t turn piss into gold – but even if you could, you’d really be turning gold into piss at the same time (at least from a value perspective).

We’d all be peeing gold, and as soon as that was common-knowledge it’d be no big deal (and gold would be worthless).

And suddenly silver would be the metal to own.

The marketing parallel: as soon as an effective technique is popularized the market or loophole is flooded and the value evaporates.

Learn to enjoy the work

There’s some bad news: if you’re looking for easy money online you’re going to fail.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t money to be made. On the contrary: the web is the among the greenest of economic pastures. And it isn’t going anywhere.

But you’ve got to do the work – and, more importantly, you’ve got to enjoy the work in the mean time. Because guess what comes after the work?

More of it.

That can be a good thing so long as you’re getting into work that is right for you.

It’s never going to fall in your lap. If you’re doing things right chances are you’ll be facing a hard slog for the first year before you start gaining momentum. That’s reality. Show me a simple/cheap/fast way to overnight success, and I’ll show you a stinking pile of dung.

The real value here, the scarcity you can achieve, is in being one of the few who pushes through the dip.

Get equipped and get going

So the idea is to forget looking for a system and start looking for tools.

Where do you get the tools? It’ll depend on what you’re after. But as a start, here are two blogs that I never miss:

• Copyblogger
• Seth Godin

Both will send you in good directions.

These are survival guides. Money systems are treasure maps – which are always either bogus or in your hands too late. Either way, no doubloons. The survival guide, on the other hand, will save your ass.

Chances are you’ll take all of the great advice and tools out there and screw up anyway. Repeatedly. There’s simply no way to tell what’s going to work for you. The only way to move forward is to try something, fail, adjust, try something, fail, adjust…

After a while of that you’ll start to find bits of gold in the pile of coal you started with.

If that all sounds disagreeable to you feel free to seek out the next foolproof system. We’ll still be here* when you’re ready.

* Affiliate Link to the Third Tribe Marketing program.

I used to write the worst code in the world.

It was sloppy, bloated and choked search engine crawlers like a boney chicken sandwich.

Then I learned the right way to use CSS. I learned it from Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll in a phenomenal book called CSS Mastery that should be on every front-end developer’s bookshelf.

That’s my copy looking well-worn from years of use.

Here’s the thing: search engines love clean code. When you give it to them your websites tend to rank better.

But if you learned how to build websites with tables and <font> tags chances are your code isn’t clean. Your pages are probably overloaded with extraneous crap that search crawlers don’t need or want.

Using CSS properly gets all of your presentational code out of the way so search crawlers can focus on what they want: your content. It’s also from an SEO standpoint in various other ways.

Here are seven ways you can use CSS to improve your search rankings.

1. Clean up your code

When code gets bloated the signal to noise ratio gets out of control. The result is code that search crawlers can’t make sense of (not to mention developers trying to get maintenance/updates done).

The beauty of CSS summed up: it keeps your styles separate from your content.

From an SEO standpoint this is great – search crawlers get straight to the content with none of the code that sets colors/fonts/sizes getting in the way. And your design can stay glorious. Everyone’s happy.

2. CSS-driven drop-down menus

Drop-down menus are nifty and add a level of usability to your website – especially when your site architecture requires multiple levels of links.

But building them from scratch sucks. So most of us grab scripts from around the web and frankenstein them into our designs to speed up development.

The problem: many of these scripts use JavaScript to construct the link lists.

There’s nothing wrong with JavaScript. It powers much of web as we know it today. But when you hide your link code inside JavaScript search engines don’t see it.

CSS-driven drop-down menus are search-friendly, because they use CSS (with some slight JavaScript) to appear/disappear. When a search crawler hits your page all of the links are visible in the source code. This promotes a “flat” site architecture – or one where most of your pages, even the deep ones, are linked from the home page – helping spread the link juice to them.

Here are some SEO-friendly CSS drop-down scripts to consider using for your next project:

• Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns from HTML Dog
• CSS Express Drop-Down Menus from Project VII
• Chrome CSS Drop Down Menu from DynamicDrive

3. Hidden/expandable DIVs

Sometimes a design calls for having a portion of the page “expand” to reveal more text or other content when a user rolls over with their mouse or clicks a link/button.

Sometimes these hidden areas are driven by JavaScript – again, this delivers the desired functionality, but from a search crawler standpoint the content is invisible.

Using CSS you can create a hidden <div> (which is a generic container), set it to be “invisible” and trigger it to appear when a user mouses over or otherwise activates it – and you can do it in a way that keeps all of the code visible to search engines.

There’s a great example of this at RandomSnippets.com (complete with the code that drives the action).

4. Use images for headings without sacrificing the text

Often times your design guidelines require you to use a certain font for your headings and other elements. But only a handful of fonts are “web safe” – meaning they’re standard to most operating systems and browsers so your users will see them.

The normal approach to this problem is to use an image instead of text to achieve the look you’re going for.

The problem: search engines can’t read words in images.

CSS provides a pretty painless solution – use image replacement to hack the text back into your heading.In other words, you get to keep your heading image AND your text (so search engines can read it).

Here are two methods to do this that are simple and quick:

• Phark
• Gilder/Levin method

5. Use images for links without sacrificing the text

Sometimes you can’t get that top navigation bar looking just right without using images for the buttons. But anchor text is important.

You could use ALT text to indicate the text in the images – and this will give the search engines a hint. But if you’re using background images with CSS for your links you won’t have this option.

Setting the “title=” attribute in your links will also give some indication – but it pales in comparison to including actual anchor text.

With CSS you can use images for your links while still including anchor text in the code.

One easy way: set your “text-indent” property to -9999px;. This essentially pushes the text off the page, leaving the image viewable. This is the same method as the Phark method listed above.

Note: don’t get funny with this and try stuffing keywords into your links since they won’t be viewable. If you get a manual review from someone on a search engine’s spam team your site will be smacked.

6. Speed up load times

Load times are a concern for search engines. Crawlers will only spend so much time parsing your pages (depending on how important they think the pages are). That means if you have pages that contain a lot of content and features chances are search crawlers won’t bother with the whole thing.

Not to mention the usability issues you create with slow page loads.

Another thing to keep in mind: Google Webmaster Tools shows you how much time Googlebot spends downloading pages at your website. Think about it: why would Google store this information if page load time was not a concern for their crawler? Do you think Google wants to send their users to pages that take 5-6 seconds to load?

Using CSS properly can chop page load times significantly. It frees your site of <font> tags, <table> tags and many of the other extraneous code that drags down your site performance.

7. Control code order

With most CSS-driven designs you can actually change the order of elements in your source code without effecting the design. This is because the presentation (the position, size, layout, color, etc) of elements is entirely separate from the code.

Why is this useful for SEO?

There’s a little issue with the way Google crawls links on to your internal pages. They only count the first anchor text they find.

That means if you link to your Services page with the text “Services” in your main navigation, but then link with anchor text “Widget Repair Services” somewhere in the body of your home page only the first anchor text will count.

So tweaking your footer links and body links won’t help if the same pages are linked to in your header.

CSS gives you a unique opportunity: to visually place an element independent of its position in the source code.

For example: if your left navigation column occurs first in the source code, followed by your body, or right, column, you can’t use internal links in the body to optimize those lower-level pages (because they’re already linked to in the navigation). With CSS you can swap the columns in the source code without effecting the visual design. So when Googlebot comes along it’ll first scan the links in your body copy, count the anchor text there and ignore the anchor text it sees later when it scans down to your navigation.

These are just a few of the ways working with CSS can improve SEO. If anyone knows of some other CSS tricks that help with SEO please feel free to drop them into the comments.

The problems Flash creates for SEO are well-documented. I covered the topic in April.

Less-often discussed are the numerous reasons, other than SEO, that building a website with Flash is the lame sauce.

1) It takes longer (increasing costs)

It takes a developer more time to build a Flash page than an HTML page. Period.

Add fancy animations and interactive elements and development time skyrockets.

When you’re paying a developer, time = money. That doesn’t mean you cut corners to save time and lower your overall costs, but consider whether that intro movie is really adding value to your user’s experience. Chances are it isn’t.

2) Maintenance is more involved and costly

How often do you change something on your website?

Once a month? Once a week?

With a Flash-driven site adding pages or tweaking content isn’t straightforward. The developer often needs to go back to the original website file, navigate to the right section, make the change you’ve requested, re-export the website file and upload it to the server. They might have to tweak the ActionScript code (Flash’s programming language).

Compare this to making a change on a WordPress site, where you yourself can log in and make the change instantaneously – no coding or uploading required.

Depending on what you’re paying your developer for edits the costs here can really add up. If you plan to have your website updated regularly you’ll probably want to stay away from Flash.

3) Flashy doesn’t mean usable

You ever sit down with a salesman who’s on autopilot?

You walk into the room and he’s off and running, tearing through a script he’s practiced hundreds of times. Waving his arms. Pointing his fingers. Smiling widely. Not a care in the world for what you’re saying.

Flash websites are like that salesman.

You land at them, they start spinning around, dancing, lights are going off, music is playing – meanwhile you’re just looking for a phone number.

And forget about bookmarking pages or avoiding the song and dance the next time you return. Most Flash websites live on a single URL (the home page) and run through the same introduction every time the page is refreshed.

Flash websites are usually too busy showing off their tricks to actually serve users’ needs.

4) You lose the ability to track user behavior

If I had to pick the most important advantage of online marketing over traditional offline methods, I’d pick trackability.

The ability to track where your visitors came from and what they did when they arrived is so crucial. It allows you to optimize your online marketing spend, focusing on the traffic that pays the bills and chopping out the dead wood.

Most analytics platforms (including Google Analytics, which we use for UnstuckDigital.com) track behavior based on page views. In other words, every time a page loads, information about the last page, the time so far spent on the website, the referral source (how the user found your site), etc is all recorded (or re-recorded).

The problem? Most Flash websites load on a single URL. The home page. That’s it. So when a visitor hits your site and starts viewing pages, the most you’re going to track is where they came from and how long they spent. That’s it. Not enough information if you’re looking to improve your online marketing ROI in the future.

5) It’s a dog when it comes to load times

Flash is pretty intense when it comes to file sizes.

When you arrive at a Flash-driven website, ever notice the loading bar that takes 1-2 minutes to fill up?

It’s there because the website is loading every single page ahead of time. That’s how most Flash websites work – the entire website file has to be downloaded to your computer before you can see even a single page.

When your users are in a hurry (and online everyone is in a hurry 24 hours a day) your “loading…” sign may as well read, “piss off!” It says, “if you were looking for speedy browsing you came to the wrong place.”

6) Design updates are a nightmare

Outside of the general maintenance tasks (adding pages, fixing spelling, updating “news,” etc) a time will inevitably arrive when you want to update the look and feel of your website.

Guess what? Flash doesn’t make that easy either.

In fact, most Flash websites are better off developed from scratch when a major design update is called for. Can you say $$$$? (Me neither that’s not a word)

Now consider the proper use of HTML and CSS. A thing of beauty. Content and presentation totally separate. Not convinced? Head over to CSS Zen Garden and take a look. Every design variation there uses the same exact source code. Read that again. Same source code. The only changes are the image and CSS files.

7) Disabled users are banished

Ever hear of the concept of web accessibility?

It basically refers to building your website in a way that allows impaired users to have the best experience possible.

Users without strong-enough eyesight often browse using devices called screen readers that, you guessed it, read the words on the screen to them so they can read and navigate your website.

And Flash doesn’t play nice with these assistive devices.

Combine this with the fact that browsers can’t enlarge the type on a Flash website, and you’re talking about a web that is exclusive only to those with good vision.

There have been some efforts to require by law that websites are built accessibly. While that may be a long time coming to fruition the incentive of improving the experience of impaired visitors should be reason enough.

8) Browser navigation doesn’t work

Just a quick point on this.

You know the “back” button we rely on so frequently?

On your single-URL Flash website it’s useless it helps people leave and never come back. Since they’ll always technically be on your home page a quick click “back” sends them to wherever they came from. And my guess is that they won’t be in a hurry to return. Just a hunch.

9) Mobile users are up the creek

The mobile web is here.

The most heavily-used mobile web browser is the iPhone. That doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Something to the order of 25 million iPhones have been purchased so far. The BlackBerry is still popular as well.

And neither of these mobile devices support Flash.

Even when the iPhone gets Flash support (any day now, Apple!) without a wireless internet connection download speeds are slight at best. Your 2mb Flash website file is going to be overkill for a casual mobile visitor. Think they’re going to wait 15 minutes just to view your home page? Not bloody likely.

10) No semantic markup

Not sure semantic markup matters?

Three letters. S.E.O.

I know I said I wouldn’t mention it, but come on now. SEO is crucial.

Semantic markup is about reinforcing the meaning or topic of a page. Critical for SEO.

Flash files don’t contain semantic markup. Sure, Googlebot can crawl Flash (sort of) – but that doesn’t mean Googlebot can assume semantic relationships between page elements. In other words, it’s going to get a garbled bunch of content and little/no indication of what’s what. Not the best situation when your page is up against a few million others in a relevance contest.

A closing note to Flash developers: I am fully aware that there are (expensive) work-arounds to most of these issues. I started my web development career building in Flash. I love Flash as much as you guys. But let’s be realistic: the vast majority of Flash-driven websites do not offer solutions for the issues in this post. Most of them suck for the above reasons and more.

http://www.unstuckdigital.com/img/posts/flashlogo.jpg

Web development projects can get expensive. There’s a lot at work behind a website. Hamsters on wheels, gnomes keeping the coal fires burning, which create steam, which turn the turbines…you get the idea.

But if you arm yourself with the right information, and take the right approach, you could stand to trim your costs down significantly.

Before you pick a developer and sign on the dotted line (right beneath the small print about your first born and burning in the fires of hell and all that) you’ll want to consider the factors that will contribute to the overall cost of your project and beyond.

There’s more to consider than the up-front price you’ve been quoted. Here are 7 ways to save:

1) Find a developer with chops and plenty of experience

Seriously. If all you care about is that it “looks pretty” and is cheap, you’ll get what you pay for.

Invariably when we take on a new client and set out to make a “quick change” or two I find myself cursing the soul of the original developer. I never had a tremendous sense of pride in my own XHTML/CSS code until I got a load of some of the bloated crap people have the nerve to pass off as code.

Here’s the deal: bloated and otherwise crummy code means it’ll take your next developer two or three times as long as it should to make updates. Not to mention it’s less search engine friendly.

So while you thought you were saving money going with the “cheap guy” you’ll end up paying the next guy for thrice as many hours as you should to swap out an image. Savings = gone.

2) Use Open Source platforms

This site runs on WordPress. We like it, because it’s easy to work with – and it’s open source (read: free). Adding a page or post doesn’t take any coding. After coding all day for clients  it’s nice to use a system that allows us to focus on content.

The Thesis theme makes WordPress better – we paid for that, but $87 is well worth it for the advantages Thesis gives you.

When you’re talking about a framework that is supported by a large community of developers it’s tough to beat the free price point. Combined with the fact that it’s pretty quick/painless (read: cheap) to get up and running on an open source platform there aren’t too many better ways to go – especially when your website doesn’t require advanced or custom functionality.

Research open source platforms that make sense for your project – then let your prospective developers know you’d like to consider this route.

3) Do your homework

You don’t need to become a developer overnight, but learning a thing or two about the ins and outs of quality development will help you make informed decisions.

Some things you should know about your next developer:

• Do they have a strong command of CSS-driven design? CSS makes your site more lightweight (faster loading times) and far easier to update down the line.
• Will they use comments in their code? This also saves time/money on updates and upgrades down the line.
• How many projects like yours have they handled so far? If you’re their first eCommerce project, for example, you might want to look elsewhere.

At some point you’ve got make your decision, but picking up some of the basics beforehand won’t hurt.

4) Get (and stay) involved

Probably the worst thing that can happen to a development project is the client falling out of contact. For whatever reason the website takes a back seat to other business issues. The developer can’t get in touch, and after a while they give up and stop calling.

It’s not your developer’s responsibility to send hired goons to your office to force your hand on those design approvals.

In fact, some web development contracts stipulate that after X number of months of unresponsiveness on your part the project will be closed and your deposit forfeited.

You initiated your project for a reason. Chances are your existing website (if you have one) isn’t quite cutting it for your business. You might not think it’s priority numero uno, but we’ve seen development projects boost our clients’ online sales by 40% almost overnight.

In other words, letting a development project drag is probably costing you business in the mean time.

Your website is truly at the core of your marketing plan – don’t let it fall by the wayside.

5) Don’t get Flash-happy

I’ll probably catch some flack on this one, but so be it.

Flash is expensive. I don’t mean Rolls Royce expensive, but all else being equal it’ll cost you more to build a Flash-driven site than one driven by straight HTML.

Combine the higher development costs with the fact that Flash is not generally SEO-friendly, and you may find yourself in need of a complete site overhaul not long after the first version goes live – at least if you have any interest in getting search engine traffic.

Flash-based websites also almost always take a lot longer to update (read: more expensive). Keep this in mind before you get all googley-eyed at the moving pictures.

6) Get your own hosting

There are plenty of developers out there who offer a “one stop shop” for your website. That means they’ll build it, host it, maintain it, setup your email and provide support on all of the above as needed.

Problem is, that usually comes at a price – a serious mark-up on resold hosting.

The developer’s argument is usually, “sure, we mark the hosting up, but we’re adding our layer of support as part of the package.”

Guess what that means.

It means when you call because your email is down your developer won’t know why, and they’ll have to tell you they’re “checking on it” while they hang up and quickly call the actual hosting company support line. Then, when they get an answer, they’ll call you back and relay the info.

Sound stupid? That’s because it is. Think you’re better off working directly with the hosting company? Now you’re thinking.

Note: some developers run their own powerful in-house servers – in which case the above doesn’t really apply. At all.

7) For that matter, register your own domain too

We’ve heard more than one nightmare story about less-than-honest developers who were “nice enough” to register their clients’ domains for them – then, when the client decided to go elsewhere, the developers refused to give up the domains. The problem: the developers registered the domains in their own name. The clients were stuck.

Breaking up is rough – but that doesn’t mean your ex gets to keep your underpants.

In one case a client was extorted out of $50k to buy their own domain back from the original developer. They were in deep with advertising and couldn’t afford to switch domains.

I’m sure there are legal ramifications of this, and if they took it to court I expect the client would’ve been awarded the domain in the end. But court cases are expensive.

I certainly don’t want to paint with a broad and ugly brush and scare the hell out of anybody. The vast majority of developers are truly out for their clients’ best interests. But why invite headaches down the road? It’s easy enough to register your own domain.

These are just some of the ways you can save costs on your next development project. Fellow developers: feel free to chime in with your thoughts (and disagreements) below.