Build Your Own Platform

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Phil Bowyer

How you build your platform is essential, but often it's importance is overlooked. Sites like WordPress.com (the hosted version), Blogger and Yahoo's site builder make it easy to get a blog up and going in no time at no or low cost. It's a great thing - right?

Actually it's not. Remember the old adage, you get what you pay for? While it doesn't hold true all of the time, in this case it's dead-on-accurate. Hosted blog solutions (including the self managed products like the one Yahoo offers) allow the novice to create a website in a flash, it also creates problems that will actually hurt your business, such as:

SEO Problems
Search Engine Optimization is a process that uses certain techniques on a page, like adding or tweaking the H1 tags, Title Tag, Meta Tags and other HTML so search engines like Google know how and when to show your site in search results. The problem is that many of these sites prevent you from accessing the files needed to do even the basic of SEO. What does this mean? People won't be able to find you via search engines.

Branding
Building your brand is critical. Being able to have a custom design and the ability to use your logo is something you shouldn't sacrifice. Why have the same blog theme as one of your competitors? That's just blending in.

Expansion & Growth
What happens if you want to add "X"? Is that possible? One of our clients used a "homegrown" newsletter service from a small little provider. She outgrew the software, but there was no mechanism to upgrade, or move to a more robust service. She had two choices, stay put and stay stagnant, or start over with a new system. It's not a situation you want to be in.

Censorship
Recently, Google deleted several music blogs from it's Blogger/Blogspot service. If you rely on your blog, and Google decides your blog violates some TOS, then you're out of business, with little or no recourse to get things live again.

Trust
You can lose a lot of trust by relying on others for your platform. People may not take you seriously if you aren't willing to "anti-up" for a "real site", or eCommerce platform. If you don't have trust, you lose.

the solution

Hire a professional. Yeah, I know what you're thinking- I'm just saying that to get business since we are a web services company. That's simply not the case. Would you do your own surgery? How about fix your car? What about that bathroom remodel, you could knock that out in a weekend right? Unless you possess the skills, the answer is no, you would go to a professional because they know what they are doing, and you want it done right. Why should your web project be any different? There is a lot more that goes into a web presence that just the HTML behind it; proper code, SEO, SMO, Usability, Accessibility (for those with disabilities) are just a few things that go into building a web presence.

So what do you do if you can't afford a professional? Well, that a subject for a another post, but start with getting your own hosting account. You can get them fairly cheap, but you have to do your research. Not all hosting accounts are created equal - in fact some (like Godaddy) create issues like the ones mentioned above. Don't get an account for less than $10/month. The $5/month services oversell, and you'll end up with a site that goes down often, and pages with very high load times.

Got questions? I'll see you in the comments.