Updated June 22, 2022.

Website Tip: Avoid The Loop

This website tip opens up with a small story:

Let me introduce you to Jeremy. He started his business 25 years ago and has been around for a long time. About 10 years after starting his business he hired someone to build him a website.

They built the website on time, and he was happy with it. It told people what his business was about and looked pretty.

Once that was complete though, he focused on other things.

Five years go by…

After all that time of not ever even looking at his website, he realizes that it’s incredibly out of date. He wants to make changes, but the relationship with his previous developer dried up. So he sought out another developer to make the changes.

After a meeting, the developer breaks the news. “Listen, this site is so out of date we can’t do anything with it. We need to rebuild it”.

Jeremy isn’t happy with this, but he can’t let that site mar his business’ image, so he pays the developer to rebuild the site.

They finish the site, and it looks great.

The developer offers to help him develop a marketing plan for his website. Jeremy declines, he doesn’t want to pay more for the website than he already has.

Five more years go by…

The Internet has been booming for a couple of years but Jeremy hasn’t touched his site. This thing called “mobile-friendliness” has started coming around. Needing to make his site mobile-friendly Jeremy decides it’s time to work on his site again.

However, his relationship with the previous developer has deteriorated, and he is forced to seek another developer.

He finds another developer, and the developer takes one good look at the site.

“Listen, your website is hopelessly out of date. We need to overhaul it…”

What’s happening here?

Treating a website as a “thing to get done” is terribly destructive, because like a car you don’t get value from it unless you drive it.

In order to make a website rebuild worthwhile, it’s vital that the website’s true value is realized through measuring analytics and engagement and responding/adjusting to these measurements. Optimize the traffic based on the measurements to get the value, and get more calls for instance.

In short, invest in marketing.

What should I do?

You can follow this website tip of avoiding the loop by sticking to the following:

Figure out why your website will be useful to your customers.

That’s it, no secret sauce. Just nail this down and you plant the seed of a successful website. If you can make the site useful to your customers it will become useful to you. With your website built around this, you can’t help but have a successful site.

In Conclusion…

Focus on your customers’ needs, set up a survey if you got an email list already set up, or learn how to build one. Otherwise, just ask when face-to-face. The general mentality is that you should be molding what you offer to your customers’ problems, not the other way around.

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