Or: “I have Front­page! Why does it cost so much to put a web­site online?”

Excel­lent ques­tion! I’m glad you asked.

When the web first started out, there were few fancy web edit­ing tools out there and every­one had to learn how to build web­sites using Hyper-Text Markup Lan­guage (HTML). As HTML itself is not ter­ri­bly com­plex, and the medium was unproven for gen­er­at­ing rev­enue and leads, many peo­ple chose this option. Lots of web­sites started pop­ping up all over the place. Many of them were just so ugly, it’s amaz­ing peo­ple con­tin­ued to use the web! But the oppor­tu­nity to con­nect with cus­tomers, con­stituents and all kinds of inter­est groups was so read­ily obvi­ous that web­sites were clearly not a blip that was going away, despite the Dot-bomb of the late ’90s.

Since the early days, the medium has matured sig­nif­i­cantly. Now there are lots of soft­ware solu­tions that allow users to cre­ate qual­ity web­sites on their com­puter. There are also lots of sys­tems that allow design­ers to put together sites that main­tain a con­sis­tent look and feel across all pages of a web­site and add in var­i­ous mod­ules that can assist orga­ni­za­tions in their busi­ness oper­a­tions. In the open-source world, these are even free!

So, if you are even remotely tech­ni­cally ori­ented, you could choose a plat­form to build your site (e.g., Dru­pal), pick a design theme, find a host to put your site and your domain name, pos­si­bly add in a cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment sys­tem if you need that, and put all the pieces together. Voila – site done and no need for any out­side resources!

Well, you could. But should you? If you’re a small busi­ness owner, I’m sure you’ve got lots of spare time to play around with all this stuff (yes, I’m being sar­cas­tic). And if you’re a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, I’m sure you’ve got more vol­un­teers avail­able that have the tech­ni­cal know-how to do it and the time avail­able to throw at this (yes, still being sarcastic).

Per­haps a sim­pler ques­tion is who checks your account­ing at the end of the year? If you tend to be the kind of per­son or orga­ni­za­tion that can han­dle this task inter­nally, there’s a good chance you’re the kind of per­son or orga­ni­za­tion that will want to do it all your own. And that’s per­fectly fine. For most orga­ni­za­tions, out­side exper­tise is used to assist them in mak­ing bet­ter choices. And so it would be with a web design firm. Depend­ing on the firm, they will do one or more of all of the above steps for you.

They should also help you in areas that you may not fully appre­ci­ate. Your focus should be on your busi­ness pur­pose – their busi­ness pur­pose is to help you bring that that pur­pose online, effec­tively. The out­side orga­ni­za­tion should be able to help you under­stand what the pur­pose of the site will be so that vis­i­tors to the site imme­di­ately under­stand what your com­pany can do for them. They should be able to assist you in mak­ing deci­sions that will help you be more effec­tive online, from search engine opti­miza­tion to host­ing choices to soft­ware that can be inte­grated into your site and pos­si­bly even to logo design.

But, like your account­ing sys­tem, remem­ber that ulti­mately for the site to be effec­tive, ongo­ing main­te­nance of the con­tent on the site needs to be per­formed by you for your organization.