Big Ahha

The other night I was watching the popular NBC show Deal or No Deal.

If you haven’t seen it, contestants pick one case from 26 cases held by 26 lovely ladies. They then choose other cases trying to eliminate low amounts so that a “banker” will offer large amounts of money to buy the case they chose at the beginning of the round. There is a million dollars at stake and  the drama starts when contestants get greedy and say “No Deal” in the hopes that they can continue on. The problem is most of the time greed takes over and they end up going home with very little.

The game made me think about all of the options available for businesses looking for help with their web initiatives. It made me think about how making a bad “Deal” when choosing a business partner can result in lost revenues, upset customers, more work for your employees and extra expense to fix something that was not built correctly in the first place. In essence your business ends up going home with nothing because you said “Deal” when you should have said “No Deal”.

Here are some things to consider when you are trying to decide from all of the options out there.

1. Your neighbor’s, sister’s, baby-sitter’s cousin in 10th grade might have one awesome looking MySpace page for his rock band but do you really want him building your website  for your “most valuable customers”?

2. A great way to save money is to go with a local college student. You can often find one to build you a site for a fraction of the hourly rate of a true local web firm. Just one question. What happens when that college student heads home for the summer or takes a three month trip to Uzbekistan and your site goes down?

3. Use Go Daddy or one of the other hosting companies with “web page builder tools”. This might work for some smaller mom and pop businesses. Remember you won’t get the same level of service you will from a local shop and when your business grows beyond the template based design you will need to start all over. If brand development and reinforcement is important stay away from templates.

4. The local newspaper, phone, cable or yellow pages company. These companies may offer web design services but it is a secondary service to the core products they create or provide for their customers. You need to ask yourself the question, how important is your website to your business. Most companies today realize that consumers are spending more time online researching, buying products and reading service reviews. In order to succeed they need a business partner who is focused on web solutions.

These are just a couple of “bad deals” you might want to stay away from when considering a business partner to create your customers online experience with your company.