Email Series Sample

EMAIL #1

1. He has no idea about marketing your business on the web. Chances are that your web designer is just that… a designer and nothing more.  He probably has no sense of how to market your business or how your target market will react to what he’s about to put on the world wide web for everyone to see.  He probably doesn’t even care, he thinks that pretty is the only thing that matters.  After all, if you think your site is pretty, you’ll be happy.  He doesn’t care if you make any more money, as long as you think what he did looks “neato”.
2. Flash Animation Sucks. Many web designers like to show off their “flashy” sites with birds flying across the sky or lightning flashing or cars racing across the screen.  Chances are, this is being done with the use of flash animation.  Problem is… flash sucks.  Yeah, it looks cool but remember, that’s all your web designer cares about.  You see, search engines such as Google and Yahoo, can’t read flash animation.  That means that you have all this cool content on your site that Google doesn’t even realize exists.  If Google doesn’t know it exists, Google can’t “crawl” the content and index it for web searchers to find.  This means that the only people seeing your site, are people who already know it’s there.  Not the potential customer who searches for your products or services.  If that potential customer can’t find or see your site, then it didn’t much matter that it featured a tap dancing moose playing a kazoo to make them smile.
3. He simply wants a piece for his portfolio. Once again, he wants to show off how he has put the fanciest stuff on a website.  He has no concept of if the junk he’s cluttering your site with will actually bring you more profit.
4. Rarely should someone pay for custom coding. Come on.  Let’s be realistic.  Of the millions upon millions of website templates out there, you mean to tell me that there’s not one that meets your needs?  Even if a custom layout and styling is used (this is sometimes easier than searching for a template), there are tools that can be used to create the functions, layout, and styling you need without paying for hours upon hours for him to custom code something that someone else has already done.  Many of these functions are sold as what’s referred to as widgets or plugins and though sometimes can be pricey, they pale in comparison to the cost of paying a programmer to custom code the function.  Not to mention that they’ve already had the bugs worked out of them.  Your designer should avoid custom coding whenever possible.  If he insists, you should question his motives to be sure he’s not just trying to charge you more or wanting for you to pay for his time just so that he can brag to his dateless geek friends about the new techie crap he did while they hang out and watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the 10th time.  There’s only one reason your business should spend money (even when it comes to a website).  That reason is to make money.  Paying for custom coding just for the sake of having custom is… well… stupid.  Pay for it only when it’s not gonna happen any other way and the custom coded feature will bring you more profit than it costs.
5. Charging extra for Content Management Access is a bunch of CRAP!! Web designers are still trying to convince their clients that the rules and tools of web design haven’t changed since the late 1990′s.  Well, there are plenty of FREE, open source platforms like WordPress and Joomla that your designer can build your site on that will provide you the ability to upload your own images and change your content.  Your designer would like you to have to pay him to update your site every time you ad a new product or take a few pics that you’d like added to your site.  If he can’t have that, he figures he might as well charge you for access to your own content if he provides you the access.  If your designer boasts of his own easy to use platform, you can bet that it’s probably based on or a knockoff of one of the free platforms anyway.

6. Your site will generally take twice as long to complete as they tell you it will. Most web designers rely solely on the building and maintenance of your site to pay their bills and feed their family.  Most are also not very business minded.  This means, they don’t think ahead to maximize productivity.  They like to ask for things from you, one at a time, so they have a reason to be dragging out your site build.  This makes them feel better about blaming you for your site not being done when they said it would be.  They say they’ve been waiting on things from you.  Your web designer should be able to take charge and tell you what he’ll need from you when the contract is signed.  There will be things he thinks of and has to ask you for later but this should not be the practice for every step of the process.  Just loose ends.
7. Your web designer probably has no backup plan. This means backing up your site in case the server it’s parked on crashes but it also means something much more important.  He probably doesn’t have a backup plan for the day he decides to take that job halfway across the country.  What about the day when he’s wearing his super cool Storm Trooper costume that blocks his vision causing him to stumble into oncoming traffic?  What happens to your site then?  Will you be screwed?  Your web designer probably builds his site like he takes care of his apartment.  Things are thrown about using the “file by pile” method so that only he knows where things are at.  This means that when he’s suddenly out of the picture, you may not be able to access your site at all.  It simply sits as an empty reminder of how bad the guy screwed you over while potential clients scoff at your out of date and unable to be updated information.  If you can gain access, chances are, Sherlock Holmes himself wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of the clutter cursing your site.  Make sure there are multiple layers of a backup plan.

EMAIL #3

EMAIL #4

… My website certainly was taking an onslaught of hits during my campaign.  There are several people out there who can bring you traffic, but JC & the AFH Marketing team showed ingenuity specific to the needs of my company that converted traffic to cash.  I recommend them to anyone looking for their website to get noticed. – Wade Walker (USGolfEvents.com)

EMAIL #5

Price should never prevent your business from having the online presence you’d like.