Today a friend called me to ask me for help putting together a Website for his small business. For the first time in years I was stumped as to what to recommend. My friend is an amazing artisan who breathes new life into old furniture, but he's not necessarily proficient at writing in Hebrew and he almost never uses his computer for anything other than email and instant messaging. There is no question that he needs a Website for his business. The question is how we can create a Website for him that is going to draw people to his business today and into the future.
Gone are the days when you could just post a billboard site to the Web and hope that people would show up at your brick-and-mortar store. That strategy never worked very well, actually.
Back in the mid 90's I advised clients to have something in their site which would get potential customers to contact them directly -- a contact form, a question and answers page with visitors' questions, a newsletter to sign up for, a freebie to request.
In 1999 and 2000 the keywords were stickiness. The longer your customers stay on your site, the more likely they are to buy from you.
In 2001 and 2002 I used to give talks about making sure that your small business website actually did something useful for both your customers and you. I built a small business of my own around building Web applications that did real business tasks using open source software as the base. My team and I created sites for e-commerce, for office management, for data analysis, for voicemail, email, and sms, and more.
Today, the buzzwords are things like "blog", "Twitter" and "social media", but really, all those lessons from before are still there. Create content that engages your potential customers so that they will think of you --or better still, be at your site-- when they need your products or services. Make sure that your customers have a way to contact you, and that they are encouraged to do so. The conversation needs to go both ways. Automate whatever parts of your business that you can, and make them securely available everywhere to both your customers and yourself through a usable Web-interface.
The question mark in the thought bubble over my head is about how to do all those things on a micro-business budget when the language of your prospective customers is not your language and, to compound the challenge, your excellence is in woodworking, not a computer-desk-bound skill like so many of us. My friend is both an immigrant to the Web and an immigrant to the country where we both live.
Luckily, the modern, ubiquitous Web has some great solutions to this challenge.
First off, his Website will be built entirely of already-existing open source software, with Drupal 6 as the core Web application framework. For businesses with bigger budgets and trickier problems, I spend weeks building custom modules and writing lines and lines of code. But my friend doesn't need a new wheel. He needs a working Website, and the plethora of modules for Drupal allow us to build that for him in literally a matter of a few hours. While we're at it, his site can be totally multi-lingual out of the box, so that he can have both his native language and the local language from the beginning.
Next, we'll use pictures and video instead of the written word. My friend can make himself understood in Hebrew, but writing coherent and engaging blog posts in your second or third language isn't easy. With today's high quality camera phones, though, he can "blog" his work with minimal text and maximal impact.
One of the big expenses of running your small business website can be storage and bandwidth. Images add to the load, but audio and video can really knock your bills off the charts. Luckily, we have sites like Flickr and YouTube to store and serve those bulky files for free. that means that we can embed our content where we want, and still keep the budget in check. For someone with a Symbian phone or an iPhone, you can even liveblog with video using Qik, and post things right to your site on the fly.
Finally, I came up with a perfect package solution for my friend. By creating a real site from free open source software with no hand-coded customizations, I can provide a site at a price that my friend and other small business people can afford, and almost none of that cost is actually going to the site creation itself. In place of hours coding, I can provide one-on-one training and support to go with the software so that the business owner can make the site a useful part of their business without having to spend a lifetime learning about computers.
As an immigrant myself, I know the challenges and the joys of working independently and building a business in a new place with a new language. I'm hoping that this new small business Website package will help others to flourish here in Israel. If you have a small business in Israel and are interested in a site that works for your business contact me directly. If you are an open source Web developer, I encourage you to look around at the tools you have to help immigrants wherever you live, and reach out to them with the power that "free as in beer" gives you.