| Its the midwife's fault |
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Who's 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 not against people with ideas, far from it; innovation is the lifeblood of most businesses. What I am against is the all to common situation where ideas take on a life their own without anyone questioning what they are for. Take for example a typical company and a typical owner (you) and your company website. I am not talking about the technology, I am not talking to the design. I am talking to the one person who is responsible, the 'parent' - the business owner - YOU. I call you the 'parent' because you treat your website like its your 'baby'. Just like a parent, you'd want to make sure that your 'baby' looks good, particularly in comparison to your neighbours. You 'baby' might have been planned, but is more likely to have just happened. You won't own up to the fact that your 'baby' is dumb, or slow or ugly (even if it is). Like a parent you'd lavish particular care and attention at birth and the preparation for it. In fact, just before birth you'd be open to ideas and discussion about what you want your 'baby' to become. But that's where similarity ends. Unlike a real parent, you'll then cast your website into the world and expect it to flourish. You may check back occasionally to see if it is still there, you may give it some sporadic attention. But mostly you'll complain that "it has never really reached its potential". You won't be wrong; its 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 you were thinking like a parent not a business owner and you 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 marketing expense - like a website? All to 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.
If you answer these questions you will be able to have a different conversation to 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. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites         Comments (0)
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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 too see what we mean and find some simple questions that can turn a your good ideas into profit.
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