It's the midwife's fault

Great ideas are the life blood of business. But sometimes the ideas are seen as the boss's 'baby' and they don't get challenged, they don't get honed to perfection and end up wasting your money. This often happens with company websites. Read on to see what we mean and find some simple questions that can turn a your good ideas into profit.

Whose child is this? That's not a question you expect to get asked at work, after all who brings their offspring to work? Well, in my experience lots of people do; not their children per se, but their offspring - their ideas and pet projects. Of course I am not against people with ideas, far from it; innovation is the lifeblood of most businesses. What I am against is the situation where ideas take on a life of their own without anyone questioning what they are for.

Take for example a typical company and a typical company website. I am not talking about the technology, I am not talking about the design. Someone in the company 'owns' the website, and it might not be who you think. Someone manages the website and does updates, but who owns it? Often you will find its the boss, or the board. At some point they agreed to its inception, at some point they lavished attention upon it ... and now its set in stone - because everyone else treats it at if it where the boss's baby.

And you can understand why. In the beginning the boss(es) treated it like a baby. Like parents they were confident that it looked good, particularly in comparison to your neighbours. They wouldn't own up to the fact that their 'baby' was dumb, or slow or ugly (even if it was). Like parents they lavished particular care and attention at birth and the preparation for it. In fact, just before birth they were open to ideas and discussion about what their 'baby' was to become. But that's where similarity ends.

Unlike real parents, they then cast your website into the world and expected it to flourish. They may have checked back occasionally to see if it was still there. But really you all know that "it has never really reached its potential". You are unlikely to be wrong; it's a fact - there are over 117,000,000 websites out there and less than 1% of them ever attract a sizable audience. But who do you blame? You'll blame the midwife, after all the midwife delivered the 'baby' and nothing changed since, it must be the midwife's fault.

And who is this midwife? Your webmaster, web designer, internet provider - call them what you will - the people who brought your baby to life. But you'd be wrong to blame the midwife - because the real problem was that your boss(es) were thinking like parents, not a business owners. They failed to ask a question a parent would never ask "What's this 'baby' for?". And "What will I get back if I have this 'baby'?".

You may disagree, and you may think that you always do ample investment planning. I am sure this is true for a new piece of production equipment, or before you hire someone. But is it true for a marketing expense - like a website? All too often the answer is no. Someone says "we need a website", someone else says "it'll cost X" and someone gets you to pay for it. If this is what actually happened in your business then you are likely to be in the majority who don't get a great return on their website investment.

Alternatively, if you want to make a difference and use your website for profit, then before you think about speaking to any web designers we recommend that you try to answer the following fundamental questions.

1. What's the big idea?
   In one sentence sum up the idea of your website
2. What goals do we want to achieve?
   This is usually a profit figure
3. How will the website deliver these results?
   Is it extra sales or cost savings? Specify all of the measurable results that will help to achieve the goals (and only include incremental results)
4. Who are the audience?
   What kind of people (in what kind of companies), where, with what needs? Why is the website going to be a greatway to get to them?
5. How many will buy/transact?
   What percentage of your target audience visitors will buy from the website, or be influenced to buy by it? And When? And how much?

If you answer these questions you will be able to have a different conversation with your website creator. Because you will know the profit goals, you will have stated the audience and worked out how much each paying customer is worth. So the question then becomes - "How can we build a website and deliver an audience that delivers this profit".

To answer this you'll both need to do more work. More research before any web design. You'll need to work out if your audience exists, how to reach them and how much it will all cost. At the end of this process you'll know as much as you need to decide whether you should invest, how much and why.