A Tangled Web

>>When Eli Fleishauer first attempted to develop a Web site for his business, Carbon Net, he made the mistake of choosing style over substance. He knew he had a hot idea—helping individuals and businesses reduce or offset their environmental impacts—and wanted to get the company’s name out. So he researched local Web designers and narrowed in on a Fort Myers company based on the attractiveness of its portfolio. He now knows he should have dug a little deeper.

For after months of phone calls, meetings and frustrations, the company still couldn’t produce the site that Fleishauer wanted, despite assurances to the contrary.

"The biggest mistake I made was picking the company I was going to use based on what I found online, rather than based on what I learned about them after I talked with them," he says. "The Web pages they had built previously were very beautiful, but not very technically deep. They seemed very genuinely to get what I was doing, but I don’t think they had the technical experience to do the more difficult aspects of what I was asking them to do."

With a half-finished Web site, Fleishauer searched for someone to complete the task. This time, he interviewed several companies. That led him to Bonita Springs-based Internet marketing and Web development firm Atilus, where he had a different experience.

"One of the greatest things about Atilus was that I got to meet everybody who was going to be involved in the process," he says. "They showed me, in that experience, that not only did they have technical skills to do it, but they knew better, cheaper and easier ways for me to do it."

Having a Web presence is a given for most companies. But when it comes to establishing that presence, companies have plenty of horror stories to share, ranging from embarrassing mistakes (like forking over money when they shouldn’t have) to stranger-than-fiction scenarios (like servers hijacked by terrorists).