Presentation by Allan Chao for Small Business Week, San Francisco May 16, 2012

1. Allan Chao
Startup Consultant
Startup V8
allan@startupv8.com
San Francisco Small Business Week 2012

2. The Agenda
 Website Planning… Budget and Time
 Components to a website
 DIY Website - Ways to build a website yourself
 Comparison of tools
 Wordpress walkthrough
 How to Hire a Freelancer
 Website building process and companies

3. Websites… before we start
 Think about your target budget first!!!
 $0 = Ask a friend to do it for free… (more on this later)
 $10-$100 = Do-It-Yourself website building tools
 $500-2500 = Individual freelancer
 $1500-7500 = Full service company
 $20,000+ = Hire someone full time in-house
 Also think about your target timeline
 2-6 weeks = Full service company
 2-3 months = freelancer
 3-6 months = a friend doing it for free
 You get what you put into it (money, time, effort)

4. Components to a Website
 Domain Registration … $10/year
 = the data record of who owns what virtual property
 Email … (free with google apps)
 = what happens to an email to me@anything.com
 Web Hosting … $10/month
 = actual physical server cost, with hard drives,
networking, and electricity
 Web code … depends on type. WP is free
 = the HTML, PHP, or anything else that happens when
the website is accessed by a visitor

5. DIY Website Building
 Advantages:
 FREE! (or very low cost)
 Total ownership
 Change content at your will
 Easy? (if tech-savvy)
 Disadvantages:
 Lots to learn
 Most time consuming
 Always template-based, not customizable
 Must be moderately tech-savvy

6. DIY Website Building Tools
 Best and the worst… based on ease of use, flexibility
 Best
 Wordpress.com
 Medium
 Wix
 Weebly
 SquareSpace
 MoonFruit
 Worst
 Web.com
 Vistaprint Instant Website
 GoDaddy Website Tonight

7. What is Wordpress?
 Wordpress.ORG
 A free, open-source platform. Managed and improved
by the goodwill of many programmers around the world.
 Built for all (simple) websites, NOT just blogs.
 Easy to use, but requires installation
 Wordpress.COM
 A company (for profit) that makes it simpler to get
started with wordpress.
 Free to start, but charges for “add-ons”
 Can be limiting, and doesn’t have the full flexibility of
Wordpress.ORG

8. Let’s Build a Basic WP Website
 Are we going to learn HTML? NO!!!
 For this example, we’ll use Wordpress.com
 Any ideas for the topic?
 http://www.randomwebsite.com/
 Choose a template design
 Write some basic content, add a picture or two
 Add a contact form
 We’re done!

9. Wordpress.com Step 1 - home

10. Wordpress.com Step 2 - signup

11. Wordpress.com Step 3 – theme

12. Wordpress.com Step 4 – dashboard

13. Wordpress.com Step 5 – editing

14. Wordpress.com Step 6 – site is live

15. Hiring a Freelancer
 Finding a Freelancer
 Craigslist 
 Online web browsing ($$$)
 Online freelancer sites: (high risk for the non-technical)
 RentaCoder
 Odesk
 Elance
 In-person Networking and Referrals 
 Most Common Mistake: Having someone you know do it
for free (or for almost nothing)
 Never finishes
 Low quality
 Eventually end up re-doing it completely

16. Questions to ask a Freelancer
 What area do you specialize in, and who does the rest?
 Graphic Design = the look and feel
 Programming = the code
 Marketing = the search engine placement
 Copywriting = the content on the site
 What CMS platform do you recommend (if any)?
 Wordpress – popular, but not a silver bullet
 Joomla / Drupal / dotnet
 None
 Project cost and timeline?
 Most importantly, ask yourself: Do you trust them?

17. Common Freelancer Pitfalls
 Strength in a single skill, weak in others
 Great designers don’t program!
 Great programmers don’t design!
 Neither designers nor programmers do marketing!
 Jack of all trades, master of none
 Mutually exclusive skill sets…
 E.g. auto mechanic vs paint job
 Poor project planning
 Goes over budget in both time and money
 Constantly feel “out of the loop”

18. Why use a Company?
 Specialists in every area
 Architecture and platform
 User interface design
 Graphic design
 Programming
 Copywriting
 Marketing
 SEO (organic)
 SEM (keyword bidding)
 Ad Networks (display ads, banner ads)
 More expensive, but better results
 Better as a long term investment

19. Getting people to your website
 After you finish building your website, what’s next?
 Traffic!
 Marketing
 Offline Marketing
 Print the URL on your business cards, flyers, etc.
 Newspaper, Radio, TV ads
 Online Marketing
 SEO = Search Engine Optimization
 SEM (PPC) = Search Engine Marketing (Pay-Per-Click)

20. Google Search

21. SEO = Search Engine Optimization
 aka “organic” listings
 “I want to be on the top of Google!”
 For small businesses, target “long-tail” keywords. E.g.
“San Francisco flood repair”, not “flood repair”
 Very complex algorithms, constant changes
 Can be very challenging, depending on market
saturation
 “Guaranteed rankings” are “blackhat”! Google will ban
the site!
 Trust is very important, fraud/cheating is pervasive

22. SEM = Search Engine Marketing
 aka Keyword advertising
 Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo
 Pay per click, $0.50-$20,
depending on keywords
 Much more stable source leads
 Must be set up correctly, or else
could be wasting money
 Many factors still at play, such
as quality score

23. What about Social Media?
 What is Social Media?
 Blogs (Wordpress, Blogger)
 Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn)
 Microblogs (Twitter)
 Location-based (Foursquare)
 Events (meetup.com, Eventbrite)
 News and Bookmarking (Digg, Delicious)
 Much, much more
 Free or very cheap, but massive time investment with
questionable payoff
 Useful for branding as a “modern” company in touch with
community
 Technically easy - Mostly unrelated to your main website
 Additional services could be offered by a company or freelancer

24. Other notes about websites
 Technology platforms
 PHP vs .NET, Wordpress vs Joomla, etc.
 Very difficult to change platforms after much use
 Must be strategic about technology platform choice
 Ecommerce and payment processing
 Ecommerce sites have much more complex requirements
 Paypal, Google Checkout, Authorize.NET
 High tech web startup idea?
 “I have an idea!” (next Groupon)
 Software development teams (internal or external)
 Management and Product Development can be very complex
 Unlimited cost potential… $$$$$+ (e.g. Google is a website…)

25. Thank you!
 Please fill out the evaluation form
 Ask me if you have any specific questions
Allan Chao
Startup Consultant
Startup V8
allan@StartupV8.com
Startup V8 helps entrepreneurs turn their vision into reality.
We handle the entire engineering and product development
for new web and mobile startups. Contact us to learn more.