5 Things for the Small Business Owner to Look For in a Web Development Agency
- Posted July 22nd, 2009
- Filed under: How We Do It, Technology, User Experience
Yesterday, a customer wrote in to tell us they loved our web site. They wanted to know what agency did it. This was quite flattering, because the answer is… us! 
While everybody in the company is at least a little involved in everything we develop at BatchBlue, BatchBlue.com is more or less the brainchild of Michelle and me. We’re constantly making updates, looking for ways to refine our message, grow our reach, etc.
But for this customer (and anyone else), what I want to do is make a list of what I would look for in an agency if (gasp!) BatchBlue were to outsource the development of BatchBlue.com.
Make sure they work with web standards.
It wasn’t long ago that just about every web developer (myself included) was building websites with tables and embedded styles. Now designing with web standards using HTML (or XHTML), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and Javascript) is the way to go. The thing is, to many small business owners, you really can’t tell the difference between a web site built with these up-to-date standards and one built on the legacy “table and font tag” approach just by looking at it.
So, what’s the big deal then?
A web site built the old way just might do the trick for you. Unless, of course, you want to do anything with it. Like change your logo. Or change your colors. Or add page with some special offers. Or optimize the site for mobile devices. Or have another developer work on it. At this point, a site built the old way can be terrible to work with.
You can see where I’m going here. If you want a quick website thrown together that you plan to completely replace in the future (when the budget is bigger or whatever), then maybe your nephew’s FrontPage skills will be just fine. But if you want a web site that will grow with you over time, get someone who knows about HTML, CSS, lean code, and “bulletproof” web design (designing with future modifications in mind).
You should see how different BatchBlue.com is compared with a couple years ago. Because it is built with clean code and CSS, every change is really just a tweak. No full redesign has ever been needed. The same could be said about BatchBook… but I would never show you what BatchBook looked like two years ago!
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