If the most important thing on a website is the copy, it sounds like graphic design doesn’t matter. And sites like Craigslist seem to bear that out. Here is an extremely successful site that has little graphic design. Some people have even called it “ugly.” Yet, it’s one of the top sites on the web.

But there’s a caveat here. Your graphic design does have purpose.

If you had to make the following choice, how would you choose?

1. A cool-looking, creative, professionally designed website, with crummy content. Or…
2. A plain but clean-looking website full of compelling web copy that makes people want to buy from you.

You shouldn’t let Coca Cola, HP, and CNN make you feel like your website ought to play like a Superbowl ad.

Small Businesses Have Specific Needs
Superbowl Ads Can’t Meet

Superbowl ads are all about appealing to a mass market. Your small business, on the other hand, survives by the grace of your clientele.

But now, with the Internet, any small business can have access to the same billions of people that Coca Cola does, the same mass market. This is as much a curse as a blessing. Because the mass-market, Superbowl-ad mindset can destroy a small business.

In this series of articles, you’ll discover:

• The one and only purpose of your small business website.
• What is the most important element of your website, and how it can make or break the deal without you even knowing about it.
• The great hidden inefficiency of traditional website design, and how Web 2.0 software makes it moot.
• One of the most powerful—and dangerous—traffic sources on the Internet, and what you need to do to safely take advantage of it.
• The 4 most important web statistics you need to understand, and why.
• How age-old secrets of advertising that we lost in the television age are now turning the web into a gold-mine for thousands of small businesses.
• And more…

It may surprise you to learn that Perl is still one of the best languages for custom web development, especially for custom intranet and extranet apps.

Yes, PHP gets a lot of publicity, and there are numerous very well represented large-scale projects written in PHP, including WordPress, phpBB2, Drupal, and SugarCRM. When you think of “web development,” you may think of PHP. PHP is popular because it is relatively easy for the layman to grasp. But for custom development, from a software engineering perspective, PHP code is more difficult to design well and difficult to test.

So ignoring PHP (and every other programming language), what are the advantages of Perl?

You may be surprised to discover that Perl is well understood by millions of developers, can do what any capable language can do, has a vast library of ready-to-use solutions and frameworks, and most importantly, can be written to be easily maintained, given a competent developer following a style guide. Here’s why:

Experts disagree on what “Agile development” exactly means, but here are some characteristics of Agile development and project management that I advocate and use. Compare them with traditional counterparts I’ve witnessed.