Monthly Archives: April 2013

Einstein’s Fish Quote & Website Management

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Einstein I love Einstein quotes. He really understood a whole lot more than relativity. One of my favorite quotes is this one: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” To me he was saying that we all have our strengths, but get outside our comfort zones and we are up the creek without a paddle.

This quote always reminds me of the scores of companies out there trying to manage their own websites. Many times, a designer has sold them on content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. You can manage yourself and save money. Is this true? Partially. I LOVE WordPress. It is an excellent CMS and fabulous for most small businesses. Blogging doesn’t get any easier and the content is search engine friendly right out of the box. BUT, if you have WordPress then you know each time you log in it seems there is a plugin update, or a theme update, or occasionally a new WordPress version. This can get really confusing. And worse, a plugin update can blow away your site. What do you do then? Can you afford to have your site down, or not displaying properly?

This is why you need professional website management. Unless you are a web professional, your skills are in other areas. Your strengths are what you want, and need to focus on to be successful in the marketplace.

So what do you do? My advice is to hire a company that focuses on website management and maintenance. You can still blog and make edits, but leave the software updates and heavy lifting to professionals.

If you feel like a fish climbing a tree, contact us, we are happy to help.

 

Sometimes having a client NOT spend money is best

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Sounds strange right? As a web development firm you would think our goal would always be to build clients brand-new state-of-the-art websites.  But, as our goal is to manage people’s sites for the long-term, our advice tends to be different from a firm that does a one-off design project. For them, it is create and move on. For me, it is create, and manage. In business I have always tried to follow the advice of Mark Twain: “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest”.

In the particular case which spurred this post, I started managing a website about a year ago for new business. The site hadn’t been designed that long before we took over the day to day management, though it left a lot to be desired.  Still, as it was a start up business, they didn’t have bags of money to spend, and certainly did not want to build a brand-new site at that point. So we looked at what the site was missing, added some new features, cleaned up some errors and made it a very usable site. We then spent time to improve the sites performance in searches. We got the website to the point where it was doing very well for queries not only in the town the business is located, but in surrounding towns as well.

Then, as it is an appointment driven business, we added a request an appointment form. Now in this day and age forms don’t tend to be all that successful as people are leery about spam, etc. But, from this particular form, they got about 15 to 20 new appointment requests within the first few months. Quite an accomplishment!

But then something interesting happened. A patient told my client that his site look a little out of date. At this point he came to me and asked me should we build a new site? Now, this is where I had to say no, if I were you I would not spend the money at this point. As a small businessman, perhaps this wasn’t my best move. But as I have said, I’m in it for the long-term, and clients truly appreciate our integrity, and the fact that we always try to do the right thing. In the long run, this type of service has led to our tremendous growth, many customer referrals, and yes in the long run more money.