Small Is The New Big

The purpose of the post is two-fold:

1. I'd like to recommend the business of some friends of mine.
2. I'd like to get us thinking about innovation, commodity and size.

Keyword First is a business run by 2 of my friends who invested early on in learning the intricacies of search engine optimization and marketing.  They understand how organic and paid search works—and how this can put you at the top of search engines.  This is increasingly becoming an important part of our business as our clients need to be "found".  Keyword First will help you get found—and the two gentlemen behind this service are both as smart (and nice) as they come.  If you're looking to be found—you should check them out. 

Next item on the agenda.  Take a look at their Website (pictured above).  It's not half bad.  I kicked the tires a bit and it was fairly user friendly, the code seemed pretty solid and though I don't think it's the most spectacular site I've ever seen—it does come across as professional.  In fact, my guess is that if you put this site in front of a potential customer—they would think that the business was much bigger.

Full disclosure—I designed the logo for my friends.  Actually, I proactively offered them up the service at no cost and they took the logo and had the site designed around it.  Now here's where it gets interesting.  As a small business, my friends found an overseas partner to design and develop this site from the ground up.  They used Elance to find the overseas partner (who ended up being based in India).

Can you guess how much the site cost them from soup to nuts?  5k? 3k? 2k?  Try $400.00 U.S. dollars.  Seth Godin recently wrote a "memo to the very small"  where he provides step by step directions on how small business can use blogging platforms such as Typepad to promote themselves online.  This is yet another option.

So what's the take away?  Small businesses have more options than ever to act like big business.  In addition, what you are seeing here is a classic example of innovation + commodity at work.  My friends have come up with an innovative idea—provide quality search marketing services at reasonable prices.  I have a feeling their business will grow.  As for the commodity part—in this case, custom Web design has become the commodity.  Remember, the site was designed from scratch—not pre-existing templates.  It started with the identity.  And compared to many corporate sites out there which suffer from basic design or usability issues—it's not half bad.

Morale of the story?  Certain types of Web services can become a commodity.  Ideas are another story.  Small business can appear to be "big".  But will big business be able to act small?

Comments

[Steve Woodruff]

Creativity, ideation, strategic thinking - these will never be commodities. Almost everything technology-based can become so, however - perhaps even Search Engine Optimization.

[DA]

Steve,

Agreed about technology being a commodity—though I don't know if I would classify Web design as a technology. Like everything else, it's enabled by technology.

What this does illustrate is the need to keep pushing. Designing a simple, straight forward site that looks professional isn't enough these days. Now that can be done for hundreds of dollars.

Yes, creativity and inginuity are where we need to continue to focus. I would also add client services as big companies will still pay premiums to be serviced in a way that makes sense for their business model.

[Raimo van der Klein]

More and more I have the feeling that the "customer game" will be played by the small and focused. The big giants will be cut-up and be pushed back the value chain to offer supporting tools and platforms(research, production, logistics, infra, distribution)

[CK]

How nice ;-). Btw, I really loved this line "if you're looking to be found". Just wanted to chime-in to tell you that.

[Tina]

Thanks for the great articles. Do you know who the Elance designer in India was? $400 is so cheap!

[Valeria Maltoni]

Funny, I was talking about how not to become a commodity with my current CEO yesterday at lunch. As a result of that conversation and my experience at the sustainability awards in Philadelphia last night (they mentioned Chicago as an ambitious goal, BTW) I wrote today's post on design of greatness.

It's very much a choice, as you say, every action, every moment, every interaction.

[DA]

Tina,

400.00 is crazy cheap. I sent out a note to my friend and will sned you an e-mail if I get the info.

[Brad Bonham]

Very nice post. When I read this, I was also thinking of the Seth Godin article about small businesses getting started via cheap blogging software.

One question I would have for Keyword First is how much importance do they place on the underlying code of a site being optimized for search engines? I ask this because their site appears to be using non-semantic table-based markup. Elements are not properly marked as H1, H2, and so forth, and there's a heavy use of tables where xhtml and CSS would do just fine. There's also inline JavaScript and Dreamweaver naming conventions that suggest the site was designed in Dreamweaver and not carefully hand crafted by an interface developer well versed in web standards practices. I've always been under the impression that semantic mark-up is good SEO business, but I wonder if it's a pretty minor deal in the scheme of things.

Regardless, the site looks really good for $400, and the code could easily be optimized at a later date (assuming this is an SEO concern). I feel it does raise the question of how important a site's underlying code is in the grand scheme of SEO, and this may be a sticky point for some web-savvy professionals looking for SEO services.

I wish your friends luck, and nice job on the logo. ;)

[MN Web Design]

I love their site. A nice, clean design for only $400? That's insanely cheap!