There’s an inefficiency built into the way most web designers put together websites. Have you ever asked yourself:

• Why does a 5-page website cost more than a 3-page website? In fact, it shouldn’t matter whether your site has 3 pages, 10 pages, or 100 pages. It should cost the same regardless, because it costs about the same amount to store 3 pages worth of text as to store 100 pages.
• Why does it have to be so inconvenient to modify or change content on the site? You shouldn’t need to wait for a webmaster to manually add or change content on your site, because a website runs on a computer. You should be able to have your computer just publish new content automatically and see it immediately appear on your website.
• Why are Web 2.0 marketing techniques out of reach of the small business? Web 2.0 is a whole other opportunity, of course, which I’ll get into when I talk about web traffic. But you don’t need to be Google to do Web 2.0, because the technology behind it is fairly simple.

The reason we face these problems is just part of how most web designers build websites. They do it inefficiently. Here’s how it usually works. The webmaster starts with a blank HTML document, called a template. The template looks like just any page from your site, except it has no content. You probably send the webmaster an email telling him what content to put on the page. He manually copies and pastes your text and graphics into the template and saves it as an HTML file on his computer. Then he uploads this file to the web server. He has to repeat this manual process for every single page on your website.

But it gets worse. On your website, you’ll need menus your visitors will use to navigate around the site. And you’ll need links from some pages on the site to other pages. The webmaster has to set up all these links manually. Now, if he plans it well, it won’t be that bad at first. Because he’ll set up all the links on the template. Then when he pastes in your content, all the links come along for the ride.

But what happens when you find out you need to add another page to the website? Or you need to rearrange the links? Or you need to make some other change? And if you’re doing things right, you will need to change things on your website. Because you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t with your customers, and you’ll want to tweak your website to work better. How will your webmaster handle that? The only way he can handle that is to edit every single page, manually. If your site has only a few pages, it might not be so bad. But with a website of any size, it’s a gargantuan task.

And that’s why a 10-page site costs so much more than 3-page site, and a 100-page site is right out.

So what’s the answer? How do we deal with this complexity? And how do we make it possible for a layman to add content, without dealing with the innards of HTML? Both questions have the same answer: We let the computer do it for us.

But isn’t that expensive? No! It’s inexpensive enough that websites like Blogger and Squidoo can provide features like this to their users for free… And make a profit, just using on-site advertising. Build a Professional Website with Homestead. Try for free! And companies like Homestead use similar technology to enable you to put together your own professional-looking small website, without any expensive up-front charges. Any of these technologies work to make maintaining a website easy and inexpensive.

Traditional web designers don’t use these technologies, however, because in their mind, web design is about look and feel. But it’s not just about look and feel, because it runs on a computer. It’s about technology, too. And with web application software, we can use this technology. And a small business owner needs to use the technology available to him, because he needs to get the most bang for his website buck.

Now, some may say it’s about performance. They may say that using a web app is slow, and that raw HTML is fast. And that may be true… for a 100-page dynamic site with Web 2.0 features… as if you could ever provide such a site using raw HTML. For 5 pages of text, it’s not going to matter one way or the other. In fact, for a site like this, the web app software will optimize everything so that it’s practically the same as using raw HTML.

Sometimes the best option may still be to use raw, manually maintained HTML. The only reason to do so is that there are fewer things to go wrong. If you really only need a 5-page mini-site, manual HTML may actually be easier to maintain. But what I mean by “mini-site” is not what most web designers mean. And I’ll talk about that next.