How To Save Over €10,000 On Your Website Launch Using Virtual Teams
Flash Hub founder, Manuel Pistner, shares how he saved €10,000 on the recent relaunch of the Flash Hub and Bright Solutions websites using virtual teams.
Listening to this episode will help you to understand how important it is to not only rely on your own experience or common knowledge of a few people.
As a specialized Drupal agency, it would seem only obvious that we have our sites build on Drupal as well. But do we really need that? What are the real requirements we have? What other alternatives we might could use to reach our objectives?
So, Manuel decided to try a different approach which saved the company over 10,000 Euro.
Listen to the episode below:
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CHRIS REEVES
Hello and welcome to the virtual frontier, the podcast about virtual teams created by a virtual team. I’m Chris and I’m part of the team here at Flash Hub. On today’s episode, our founder Manuel Pistner shares how he personally saved over 10,000 Euro by using a virtual team for the website relaunches that he recently completed for Flash Hub and Bright Solutions. So here is episode seven of the virtual frontier.
MANUEL PISTNER
I everyone, I’m currently the situation that I want to relaunch two websites. The first one is flashhub.io, and the other one is brightsolutions.de, and I want to share some experience working with my virtual team that saved me more than 10,000 Euros with a website relaunch. So in the past, we were a Drupal agency and everything we did in the web was done with Drupal. So that’s what we know and that’s what our people always consider when they want to create a new website. site or portal or whatever on the web, we started to consider to relaunch our site in May last year. And we’ve created designs and then allocated a budget of 15,000 euro to relaunch the whole site. But when we started with a detailed technical conception, we discovered that this might not be enough, and to increase the budget to 20,000, even to 25,000 Euro just for the website relaunch. And if we would do this with Drupal, this is realistic.
Drupal is an enterprise content management system. And it’s built for large websites that have multinational content and need proper quality assurance. So it’s a software development project. But what I need is not a software development project. I just need my website. I want to be able to do online marketing. I want to nurture leads. I want to integrate with HubSpot I want to be able to launch new content silos quickly and I want to create new landing pages quickly so that I can run my ads on them. That’s everything I need. I don’t want to deal with complexity that comes with technology. I don’t need DevOps to be involved. I don’t want all these complex things like decoupled front end, and Docker, etc. All this is good for quality and software projects, but not for my website. So what I did is I asked my COO, Janet and asked for her advice. And what she said is that if you just want a website, a static one, then even WordPress is too complex. You can go to a static site builder, such as Wix or Squarespace. And there, you can build your website. And I thought, Wow, that’s great.
And I tested it. I hired an expert by our HR department that can give me a consultancy about how WordPress works for site building how Wix works for sites building and how Squarespace works for site building, Because I had no idea. And I want to base my decision on facts and assumptions. So on the same day, I got three experts for those three CMS systems. And they gave me a personal presentation about how it worked. This allowed me to get real insights and to compare the features not only from the perspective of one expert, but from the perspective of three people. And they were slightly different. So what I did is I put them together in a Hangout, and they should discuss the how they see things different. And this led to a much better understanding from my side, so that I know what these people assumed based on my requirements, and what they understood how I want to use my site. And all the systems were really nice to use.
So it was hard for me to make a proper decision based on my requirements. I just know that search engine optimization is very important for me because I want to save money on paid ads and I want to increase my visibility on organic search. What I did again is I hired a SEO expert, not only one but again three. And I asked them what is required from a technical perspective for my site so that I can ensure a proper ranking.
Of course once I have good content, and they gave me a list the checklist of things that I need to respect for my website relaunch, and then I had facts on what really matters. And with these facts, I went back to my three WordPress and Wix and Sitefront experts, not side front but Squarespace experts, and I asked them which of the CMS systems is able to deliver these technical requirements. And based on that they gave me a clear decision for WordPress. Of course for a static page builder like Squarespace, the budget is much lower. You don’t need to hire a developer. You don’t need to deal with servers and updates and everything. But this low price comes at the cost and the cost of flexibility.
For example, if you want to add Rich Snippets to your search engine representation of your content, this is simply not possible not yet possible with Squarespace. So what was obvious for me, you really must understand what are your requirements in detail, not only other top level, because I was to jump about, I was about to jump directly on Squarespace. It is easy to use has a nice interface, but then it lacks the detailed features that I need to be able to grow my site in organic search. So I went to WordPress, and now I could rely on a single WordPress developer But I myself don’t have any experience with that. So what I did is I put two WordPress developers together, and they should discuss how they want to build the site.
So they should write a checklist for best practices, how I can set up the site based on best practices, so that I have maximum flexibility, and my side is prepared to technically for good search engine optimization. And this just shows how you can easily combine people, experts that can give you much better insight based on facts, not on assumptions that you will get when you just evaluate things by yourself and you don’t even know the requirements in detail. Or even better, if you let people that have different assumptions based on their own experience, and what they learned. So they can discuss their different point of views to a specific subject and why listening to these conversations, you will learn a lot you will learn what they assume how they would solve things differently and what that means for you, you can always jump in and ask questions.
And this is a mechanism that we leverage when working with virtual teams that we don’t rely on individuals that we don’t want to trust, not even ourselves because we only know that we don’t know nothing. And just put together all the information that we need to make proper decisions. This is how we learn a lot. And this is how we ensure that we make decisions based not on assumptions, but maybe on three or five or even 10 opinions and experiences of experts.
Yeah, and now I struggled to relaunch our site since May last year. So this is now eight months ago almost. And within this a month, nothing happened because we just postponed the relaunch the budget was high. And we expected to even have to invest more than 25,000 euro. Now with my WordPress developers, my search engine optimization experts, and I even have some experts for pay per click advertising on Google and LinkedIn and Facebook, etc.
And they give me a complete strategy and requirements, what I need to do to be able to build my site. I also involve some content experts, they will give me a content strategy based on the analyzes of the SEO experts so that I know that my content contributes to my keyword strategy. Without a strategy, you don’t know what you do, and then it’s worth nothing, you will definitely for sure go into the wrong direction. And with this whole team, now, I’m able to relaunch my side based on a proper strategy with the right technical setup. And even with a refinement of my existing content so that it’s not only nice, readable, but it also ranks Google. I have a budget of now only guess what 5000 euro. And the whole team committed on delivering that. And this is a leverage of, calculate your percent by yourself. But it’s a saving compared to 25,000 euro of 20,000 euro.
I know that I need to allocate some budget on top because there might be problems that I can’t see yet. And then the relaunch might even cost me 8000 Euro, maybe it’s even 10,000 Euro, but it’s still 15,000 Euro cheaper than relaunching with what I always did and what I know which is Drupal. So the message that I want to give you is always consider if what you know what you experience and what you assume is the only thing that is right, and if this is really the right way for you. If you are unsure, that’s a good start. Then go and find three experts don’t rely on a single one, but ask three or four or even more people and learn and get insights, and then ensure that you have all the requirements together and make a proper decision based on the facts. This is really critical.
And as in my example, it will save you thousands of euros. So project success is about people about the right tools about the right methods. And yeah, about your requirements. If you don’t know what you get to we get something but it will not make you satisfied. So take care and I wish you successful projects.
CHRIS REEVES
I’d like to thank Manuel for taking the time to join us today. I learned quite a bit, so I hope you did too. You can subscribe to the virtual Frontier or leave us a review on Apple podcasts Google Play Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere else podcast found. If you’d like to learn more about virtual teams as a service, visit flashhub.io On behalf of the team here at Flash Hub, I’d like to thank you for listening. So until next episode, keep exploring new frontiers.
