How you doing? My name is George Weiner, I'm the Chief Whaler of Whole Whale and I am
talking about vague, sometimes ambiguous questions that you may ask a developer.
We find ourselves in these conversations at times, as leaders of nonprofits and
social impact organizations, where: oh my gosh, we need to build a website,
we need to make a change. So I'm just gonna go back and forth and cover this
conversation from what you're thinking as somebody who needs to manage this
project and what the developer is thinking when they get this type of
question that is vague, yet important. So the first question that we hear a lot is,
"How much does a website cost?", and fundamentally, it's going to cost
as much as you have. You will get what you pay for. It's totally possible to do
a website for $100. You know? Go to Squarespace. Just pay them. Click on
buttons. But then you end up with templates or brochureware that may not
communicate your brand. The website ranges, in terms of costs, that Whole Whale
does, are, you know, billed when we do them. We'll start at about 30k and
go up from there. So when you're thinking about the cost, it's important to do and
go through the RFP: the request for a proposal process.
wholewhale.com/rfp will literally walk you through -- for free -- the questions
you should answer. In terms of functionality, in terms of the content, in
terms of the brand and design elements that you need to create your website.
You can easily get ripped off if you walk down the street saying, "Hey, I've got
250,000 dollars, can you make me a website?" No one's gonna say no to that.
As a strategy, I much prefer building for exactly what you need first and not
blowing the bank thinking that once I build this tower there's no maintenance
whatsoever; it's not a single one-and-done cost. After you build this
structure, it's gonna need the plumbing, the electric, the work done. It's not just
going to stand alone and just continue to produce for you, unless we're talking
about a brochure. So, it will cost what you have, balanced with what you need,
and I've given you some ranges there -- you can build at these different levels.
"How hard is it to change that thing on the website?" Now the funny thing about making
changes on the websites is, there is super easy and super hard depending on
how flexible you are in terms of how that's executed. Most sites -- say, if you
are in a Wordpress site -- have style sheets. So if you wanted to make a change,
let's say, to the color of the background, or color of the nav: that is literally
like one line of code that you can just change. Generally speaking, we're talking
about an hour's worth of work in order to change a color, or change something
about the nav, and move things around and organize. Those are controlled generally
through WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. So inside of WordPress you
can go in, click inside the menu, and suddenly move things around. So those
types of changes, pretty easy. However, if you're starting to play around with the
functionality of the site, that's going on for every site, every page, then it can
get a bit deeper. If you have to go in too deep, what is called the backend
coding, of how maybe forms are working -- depends on how that's set up -- that can be
difficult, because it deals with a database. You want to also consider, if
you are making aggressive changes to the layout of pages, how it's not just your
desktop, but also how it's gonna appear on mobile. But if you come in with a
flexibility -- "Hey, I'm trying to get from point A to point B for my users and be a
bit more flexible," rather than saying, "It has to be done exactly this way. It must
be 800 pixels wide, or I'll eat my hat!" -- you can work with a developer in
finding the the most reasonable way of executing the edits on hard or easy to
change in a website. "How long will it take to do X or Y?" You're gonna get a
much more vague answer if you're not as specific. So again, I encourage you, even
if you're just doing some updates, to really itemize it out. You can use a
faceted feature list to say, here are all the -- here's all the functionality
elements that I want done on my site, and then go through and say, all right, here's
my business need, here's my user value for it from one to five. And please, as
you know, you can ask your developer, please give me a rating of one through
five -- one being easy, five being hard -- of how long you think this will get to take.
You're doing two things. One -- you're proving yourself the value of whether or
not it's worth it to build the thing. And then, also, you can maybe reprioritize
based on how hard it is and also the value you're gonna give to the business
or your users. In terms of estimation, anytime someone says, "Hey, you know," once
we're getting over the couple hours fix, and it's like, "Oh that'll take me a few
days." In your mind, a few days means, "All right, I can get it by freaking Friday,
because I'm talking to you on Monday." In developer-speak it's could meaning like
that many hours, so wait a minute they're actually talking about 24 actual hours,
and they're doing 24 hours of in-depth, focused coding over the course of a
month. Clarify when you're talking about days, in terms of number of hours to do
the work, or delivery dates. As a rule, in my opinion and in my experience,
developers are not the best project managers. So I'd go back to the faceted
feature list, saying, "Hey, which features are we rolling out at which parts?"
"How long will it take?" is generally best answered if you can itemize what you're
trying to do -- again the great tool, wholewhale.com/rfp. "How long until
Google indexes my site or I show up in search?" The most common time you're
asking this question is either when you have created a new site, or relaunched
your old site. In the case that you have relaunched your old site and you're
starting to see a more than three month drop in traffic as Google re-indexes
your pages -- ideally it's before that you start to see that, all right, organic
traffic, which means people typing in keywords that come to your site
previously, start to rise back up again, great -- but if that's not happening after
three months, something is very very wrong,
and you should do something like hire an SEO expert, in order
to come in and see like what's gone wrong. How long it's going to take to
show up in Google search results is a tricky one, because it may never. You
should start to see a bit of trickle into that, into that page though, over
that course of anywhere from like three to six months start to see a
little bit more, but in general if you've waited six months and you're still not
there, you're definitely like -- nothing's coming for you, right? Train's left the
station, you just didn't optimize for that keyword the way you should've. You can
do searches on incognito and see where you're landing. You can use certain tools
like Moz or even ahrefs to find where you're ranking on that
page. It's also dependent on a number of SEO factors. Whole Whale has got an
online course for content marketing and SEO which goes, you know, hours into the
topic. "How long until this happens?" can be difficult. You should be at least
monitoring and being able to answer your own questions by also using Google
Search Console, in conjunction with Google Analytics, to tell the traffic
that's coming into your page: to see which pages you're on and frankly if
you're not on page one that's where 90% of that traffic is going anyway from the
the click-through, or they refine the search. So that is the the general answer.
This has been Whole Whale TV, talking about vague but important questions.
Please send us a tweet @WholeWhale if you've got a weird sort of
tech question that's come up and you want to see some translation on it.
If you want to see more videos, voila! I'm not being vague at all. Quite specific in
fact -- there's one right here.