When I built my web site womanht.com a few years back, I prided myself for the amount of money I thought I had saved. Being an IT professional, I used free services to setup my site. I only paid for monthly hosting fees of US$20 initially, using netscape composer for the web pages and java for the animations.
As time went on, I bought microsoft frontpage to help me manage my site. That set me back another US$100 or so.
A year ago, I started a newsletter and sent that out using netscape mail.
All that was fine at first, when my site was small.
Over time, the Frontpage extensions kept getting corrupted. Forms went haywire posting data to the wrong text files. Lots of feedback went missing. Even my unsubscribe form captured a fraction of the people who unsubscribed from my newsletter. Being unaware of the problems (everything looked ok, the unsubscribe file capture 1 or 2 unsubscribes each week), I continued sending out the newsletters to people who had already unsubscribed. Then I would scratch my head and wonder when I get angry emails accusing me of sending unwanted emails.
My costs increased over time. I bought additional tools to help me manage my site. I had to pay my host more as the size of my site increased.
Then when my newsletter subscription list exceeded 2,300 subscribers, I finally had to use a tool to help me send them out. Up until then, I had been sending out the newsletter to 80 to 100 people at a time, manually using netscape mail. It was taking a whole day just to send out one newsletter.
I imported my mailing list into the free mailing list service recommended by my host, sent out the newsletter and called it a night.
The next morning, my mailbox was flooded with complaints!
That free mailing list was a discussion list. To make matters worse, every unsubscribe or email sent to everyone in the mailing list. More than 50 emails had been sent out to the entire list in a matter of hours.
The next 2 weeks was spent filtering through the emails, identifying the unsubscribes from the spam, putting an apology on my site and emailing individuals to apologise and explain what happen. There is now so much ill will towards my carefully crafted site. That mailing list I kept off line, never loaning or renting or *shudder* selling it to anyone had been destroyed.
I looked around for a reliable mailing service and these don't come cheap. I managed to get one that would send out up to 2,500 emails a month for US$25.
Site build it costs like US$300 a mail, includes mailing newsletter tools, hosting services, page generation, keyword generation, search engine optimization and so much more. Heck that search engine optimization tool I got cost me half as much as the site build it package. My hosting costs almost as much as site build it package. Now that email service costs almost as much as site build it.
I am paying 3 times more than what would have cost me if I had used site build it for my site.
I contacted site sell,but they advise against transferring my site to site build it. Site build it is fabulous for building a site from ground up, but not for use on already existing sites. If I were to transfer my domain to site build it, I would have build my pages all over again.
That was not all. My frontpage extensions were so badly corrupted, I could not seem to upload my pages properly anymore. I contacted my host, they reinstalled the extensions and I had to upload my entire site section by section to restore it. More down time. Even more blows against the image of my precious web site. (OK I'm a fan of Lord of the Rings)
Lesson learnt: When building a web site, plan for growth. Invest where you have to and you spend far less money, with less hassles in the long run. If I had started off using site build it or a similar package, I would have saved a lot of money, and that awful newsletter incident with the breakdown of my site would not have occured.
Invest in site build it and save in the long run.
Presented
in Association with SiteSell and Janice Wee.
