I want to discuss various issues involved in starting a small Christian web design business. Its one thing to volunteer your time to helping others develop a site, but often the working environment is informal and things are a little fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style. In all of my projects I have always had a basic project plan and a mental picture of how I want the site to be designed. This is great for such informal projects, but when you have to develop in a more professional environment, you must have a formal plan in place. This is where it gets a little tricky. Here are a few of the items I have found tricky to produce…

Mission & Vision of Company
It is important to define the scope of your business and the purpose for pursuing business opportunities. As a Christian web design company, I have a Vision of helping Christian ministries outreach and evangelize to other believers and to non-believers alike. The Internet provides an opportunity of reaching millions of people. A web presence is a great way to reach many people who might not come to your ministry otherwise.

Develop a Business Plan
Once you understand the purpose of your company, you need to write up a formal business plan that outlines various aspects of running your business. This plan does not have to be elaborate or cover every little detail out the door, but it does have to cover the basics.

Some of these basics include:

• Company summary - what is the company, who owns the company, what is the scope, mission and vision, how is it structured, where will it be located
• Services provided - a breakdown of clientele or who your target audience will be, types of services offered, etc
• Market analysis - a competitive comparison to identify a need for your services and a target audience
• Marketing strategy - how you plan on getting into the market and finding new clients, a plan for promoting your services, a pricing strategy
• Financial plan - how are you going to finance startup costs, what are the costs involved in operating your business and how will you cover these costs until the business becomes profitable, what is the projected target for revenue during the first few years

Most of this information can be gathered over the Internet and by doing a business search through your local city, county and state agencies.

Organizing All the Details
It is one thing to know how to do something; it’s a whole other thing to know to do it smooth and efficiently. When running a formal business, you have to keep things running in a logical order. The client most likely has no idea what it takes to develop a good website. As Internet users we often take website design for granted, but what happens when you come across a site that doesn’t display properly; has missing photos and images; takes forever to load; has the same content as every other site or no content at all? You click your browsers back button and find a better site.

It takes a lot of work to make a design that works, and it can’t be done without passing along a lot of guidance to the client. So it makes a lot of sense to put your development process into a document for the client to follow along.

This document will most likely be a “living” document that constantly gets updated the more you work with it. It needs to cover all the basics from start to finish of the website, and even the maintenance and warranty details after the site is live.

Here are the items I cover (so far) in my “Getting Started Guide”:

• Discuss domain name selection
• Discuss how to select a hosting service
• Discuss different hosting service features
• Discuss the website development process
• Discuss how to collect content and organize it into categories
• Discuss the various page layouts, navigation menu options, color schemes, font types, graphic and image types
• Discuss added or extra options such as Blogs, email setup and freeware/box software they may want to acquire.

These are just a few items that will come up throughout the design process and having a majority of it documented will make the project flow smoother.

Contract Development
This was very difficult and can be expensive if you choose to have it done by a lawyer. There are a few decent web development service contracts on the Web that can be customized to your personal business needs. This is the path I followed. I am still working out the kinks of my Website Design Contract. You will need to have separate contracts for the different types of services you offer. I am planning on having three contracts total; the main Website Design Contract, a Long-Term Maintenance Service Contract and a Short-Term/Job Specific Maintenance Contract.

In Closing
This is only a snapshot of the hurdles you have to jump through when starting a small web design business. I will continue to post commentary on this blog discussing other aspects of running a home-grown small business. Thank you for visiting and God Bless.