Ryan Christensen — Your friendly neighborhood web specialist

There’s a new project in the oven, and yesterday marked first full day of active development. Our goal is to address the “broken” nature of certain web services as far as their availability to the small businesses of the world. We want to make website maintenance (and other web services) less complex, more accessible, and more cost effective for small businesses.

Before we get to the juicy details exactly what this new project is, I’m going to offer some observations on the state of website maintenance, web consulting, and things of that nature. This will give some background for the why, so next we can discuss the what and the how in greater details later on.

1. There are no obvious winners in the HTML/WYSIWYG (offline or web-based) editor game. When anything visually complex or unique is attempted, a messy solution is too often the result. Code is turned to soup. Bad soup, at that.
2. WYSIWYG aside, website maintenance is something that always benefits from the touch of an expert. There are contextual intricacies to copywriting, design, usability, and search engine friendliness that simply can’t be programmed into applications built to satisfy the lowest common denominator.
3. This is not a rant condemning web editing software. No software can be expected to satisfy each need for every potential situation. Software often relies on the 80/20 principle, resulting in focused (and higher quality) solutions intended for broad application. Unfortunately, this leaves a largely un-addressed market in dire need of better solutions.
4. There is a serious lack of affordable web knowledge available to small businesses. Even less expertise that can suggest how best to market a certain product online, how to develop a search engine strategy, and so on (in plain english, at least.) Worse, the large majority of us out there charge hourly at a rate that usually requires the client to ignore what they might really need, focusing only on what they can afford. It’s the nature of trading hours for dollars.
5. While there is a slew of web-workers available to do a given clients’ bidding, few clients can know what is truly best for them in the long term. (Example: it’s generally a bad idea to ask the cabinet salesman what cabinets you should buy when his pay directly relates to your decision.) I’m not implying widespread dishonesty in the industry, instead identifying the general nature of any service/product industry when it comes to sales.
6. Clients of the world would all do well to retain a sort of “web genius” to help iron out their exact needs—someone to sift through the jargon without profiting off the resulting decision. Unfortunately, this is rarely an affordable option.

So, what does this all mean? There are a few companies out there that are headed in the right direction when it comes to “helping” small businesses with these problems, but there needs to be a balance between hiring a full time web-head and having no web expertise on staff at all.

These issues have plagued the web industry (and small businesses) for a long, long time. Accordingly, we see this as an opportunity to bring a more cost-effective web expertise and maintenance solution to small businesses with a web presence—a market that hasn’t seen near enough love in recent years.

Check back regularly for updates on what exactly we’ve got planned. We have an aggressive development schedule, so you should see updates with some regularity.