Posted on Sunday, 20th April 2008 by CopywritingCat
Another website horror story.
“I hired a website developer. Spent lots of money. And now I can’t get in and make changes. They own the domain name. They control the hosting. And now that I’ve paid they never return my calls…”
“So how did you find this wonderful person?”
“My BNI meeting.”
BNI is what they call a “leads group.” You get rewarded for bringing leads and referrals to members of your chapter.
BNI is more structured than most other networking groups. But after any lunch meeting, it’s easy to find yourself saying, “I’ll call Charlie. That’ll solve my problem and give me some status in the group.”
The problem is, you don’t know much about Charlie. And you may need a whole different service.
I’ve given up networking because. during a friendly lunch, I can’t say what I think about web designers. (I also can’t say what I think about chiropractors and some other professional services, but that’s another story.)
I hire designers and work with them. But if you’re starting from scratch, you’re on a tight budget, and you don’t know your CSS from your HTML, you’re vulnerable. You’re better off starting with a marketing consultant, business coach or copywriter. Most copywriters do business coaching anyway, even if we use a different name.
There are some really great web developers. They’ll coordinate design, content and maybe some SEO. They’re not cheap. And they’re usually overbooked.
I know just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous…so when I needed to overhaul my speaking page, I hired a terrific micro-project designer through Rent-a-coder. Check it out here.
The top Internet marketing gurus spend big bucks on copywriting and spend very little on design. But that’s not what I can say at a polite networking lunch.
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Tags: bni, copywriting, networking, web design
Posted in Web Design and Web Hosting, copywriting, networking
