At the risk of stating the obvious, in order to get your website on the Internet, you need… uh… A website.

This is the part that we usually think of when we say “web design” or “web development.” This is the part that we pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have someone professionally put together. Most business owners are willing to part with the cash, because they don’t understand HTML, web hosting, domain name registration, and PHP. And I can understand this. And this problem we can solve.

But there’s often a more insidious reason for hiring a professional web designer. A fear lies lurking under the surface. It imprisons their thoughts. They fear that if they put up their own website, it’ll fail. So they conclude that only a professional can produce a web design that will work. For these projects, “web design” frequently means “graphic design.” And web-design shops are more than happy to give these business owners exactly what they ask for: Slick, highly customized web pages costing thousands of dollars.

And then they write their own web copy.

One small-business owner spent $10,000 on his website. I don’t know how many concept sketches he discarded for that amount of money. I also don’t know what he got for it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. Maybe it included custom animations or Flash programming. Or maybe it was just really, really pretty. Whatever, it wasn’t worth $10,000. And I know this because of what he did next. He painted over his new gold-paved information highway with web copy he wrote himself.

Now, I’ve been a software developer for most of my life. I remember the Internet from back before there was a world-wide web. I’ve done a little of almost everything related to web technology. I’ve even done my share of graphic design, and some of it ain’t half bad. (Like my personal blog site.)

But I’m also a writer. Many years ago I learned to write essays and business documents. And then I learned how to tell stories and keep them interesting. Finally, I learned how to write sales copy. This is the hardest of the three.

If you want a website, you can use off-the-shelf software and templates. You can push a button and—literally—your web site will just pop out. And it will even be good enough to start your business out on the web. But there’s no magic button you can push for good sales copy. The computer will never be able to write copy for you, because copywriting is a creative process. And someone who knows how to write just business documents will never be able to write sales copy for you, because copywriting is an advanced skill.

Yes, there are copywriting templates and there’s software. But these only help you once you know how to write copy and test copy. If you don’t have copywriting skills, templates and software do you little good.

So, if you’re going to spend $10,000 on your website, here’s what you do. You first take nine of those thousands and hire a professional copywriter to write your site’s sales copy and to help you plan your website marketing. Then you have a whole thousand bucks left over with which to play with the graphic design. And that’s plenty for most small businesses.

I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down on graphic designers or on web programmers. I just want to keep the priorities straight: Copy is much harder to get right than graphic design is. You may be able to get by with an off-the-shelf graphic design. But you will need custom copy.

Once you know the website is actually drawing new customers and generating repeat business… That’s when you’ll want to hire a graphic designer to improve the look and feel of your website. Because then you can make graphic design an investment, not an expense. “If a better graphic design increases conversion rate by 10%, then that will earn us $X more per year, so I’m comfortable investing $Y in a graphic designer.”

To top it off, if you’re strapped for cash, you yourself (or the high-school student you hired part-time to help out around the office) can do the actual website part with a home-study course, such as Jim Edwards’s Mini-site Creator Home Study Course. But there’s no such substitute for good copywriting.