As a speaker, your stage presence is part of your presentation. It's no different online! Your online presence is what others see of you across the web and all other types of electronic media. It ranges from how you answer the telephone to the viewer's experience at your website. None of the pieces can be ignored.

Kill Your Web Designer

by Tom Antion

No, I'm not suggesting that you yank out an AK-47 and blow your Web designer's life away. I'm using "kill" here in the same sense as you might say "kill the lights" or "use the kill switch." Turn off your Web designer's money-wasting flood of hostage-taking tactics.

If you read this article and can honestly say that your Web designer doesn't engage in these practices, by all means keep them around! There are, Heaven knows, precious few such designers around. But if you're like most of us, at least a few of these behaviors are likely to sound all too familiar. In that case, it's your duty to turn off your Web designer's money spigot and find someone else (or learn to do this stuff yourself; it's not that hard).

Any semi-literate eight-year-old can design a Web site. Just look around the Web and you'll conclude that it is being designed largely, if not entirely, by semi-literate eight-year-olds. That does not mean that these people can design a useful and successful small-business Web site, though.

Ask yourself this simple question. Can you or someone on your staff easily add navigation buttons and pages to your site and update the contents of existing pages? If your answer is "No," then your Web designer is holding you hostage and you should kill him or her. Period.

Why shouldn't you let the Web design "expert" handle such things? Simple. You can't afford to find your business stymied while you wait for someone else, whose agenda isn't the same as yours, to find the time and inclination to fix a problem. Whether it's a typo or a product price change or a color switch or a new product you want to add to your catalog, you need to be able to control when and how these changes happen.

You need tremendous speed if you're going to gain and maintain a tremendous marketing edge on the Internet. Every minute your site is inaccurate or incomplete or non-functional, it costs you money and market share. Web designers almost certainly have another agenda. They want to work on cool projects that pay short-term cash. You've already paid them and nobody likes to do routine maintenance work on a site. So you go to the back of the line, the bottom of the compost heap to rot while your competitors, who know how to manage their Web designers, beat the crap out of you in the marketplace.

Don't let this happen to you. Insist that you or someone on your team be taught how to make basic site changes and that you have all the necessary login names and passwords to get at the site to make the changes. If your designer balks at this request, kill him or her.

It's your site and it's absolutely crucial to your business. Take charge of it.

Wanna now what to do with a dead web designer?

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©2001, Tom Antion. Tom Antion is a frequent keynote speaker, known for his presentation skills, as well as his outstanding application of online marketing principles. Visit Tom's website at Antion.com.

Direct comments or questions about this article to:
Tom Antion, Box 2630, Landover Hills, MD 20784. (301) 459-0738
Outside Maryland (800) 448-6280, Fax (301) 552-0225,
Email tomantion@AOL.com, tom@antion.com