Today I visited ecommerce expo in London. It was interesting, not only for the presentations on social media but also to see the number of snake oil vendors operating in the marketplace.

You know, the types who’ll sell you a “custom” website for £4k (5 pages only, template-based, and SEO advice extra, of course).

It made me think of my dad and how he goes bananas when I tell him how much it costs to service my car, and what they actually do for it. “£xx for an oil change!”  and so on. But he knows a thing or two about cars – don’t most dads??

But cars are as alien to me as the web is to him. I’m sure he’d think £4k for a website was a bargain. Even £10k.

And there lies the problem when it comes to these vendors. If you don’t know enough – just enough – about what service they are actually offering you, how much work they will do, how can you know whether you’re being ripped off or not. How would you know whether you are paying for something that is very difficult, or something that is quite straightforward (and therefore really shouldn’t cost as much).

So I thought about how someone could become better informed about the web. Not enough to be a developer but enough to know when you’re being taken for a ride.

In my view, its simple. Make use of all the free tools out there and build yourself a basic web site.

For example:

• get yourself a free web editing program, some cheap web space and a couple of good books (Bulletproof Web Design, for example), and create a simple web site. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. The aim of this is to get an idea of standards-based design, html and css.
• Before starting, spend a little time doing the excellent free tutorials about html and css on w3cschools first
• Once you’ve created your site, upload it to your web space, stand back, be proud and have a cup of tea!

• then, check your site’s code by running your site’s live pages through the w3c markup validation service. This is a great way to learn more about coding and how to debug your site, which makes it work better across different browsers, load faster and be easier to update.

• then start exploring the world of plug-ins available for your site, starting with something simple such as a google adsense or an amazon affiliate plugin. (And maybe make some money

• while you’re at it, include some code from google analytics

By the end of all that, you’ll know a little about how easy it is to build a simple web site.

And when it all boils down, a simple site isn’t really that much different to how big CMS systems work. They still use css for design layout, they still use html / xhtml for content rendering, they still require metadata to be added to each page (keywords etc, which are important for SEO) and they still use javascript (and sometimes also iframes) for inserting plug-ins and pulling content through etc.

So you’ll also know at a basic level about how CMS systems work at presentation layer level.

(They also use design templates, content wizards, user permissions, application script calls and so on but the fundamentals of css, xhtml and javascript remain.)

You’ll still be a long way from being an expert but hopefully you’ll feel more informed about just how “difficult” some of this web stuff really is.

The web equivalent to being able to change your car’s oil yourself or at least know if you’re being ripped off!