I’ve found from experience that the total of people who say you can make your own small business website is roughly equal to the amount of people who say that small business websites don’t work.
You can do your own electrical wiring for your business – did you know that?
You can do your own electrical wiring for your business – did you know that (spoiler: but you’d be a fool to try) Watch a few YouTube videos and maybe do a short Udemy course and your can start installing power sockets in your office. And, assuming you don’t kill yourself in the process, you can save some serious money.
It sounds ludicrous and I know I’m being ridiculous but it happened in a building I once worked in. Exposed electrical wires were found in the ceiling above a secretary’s desk and the second they were discovered the building was shut down. When they investigated deeper they found it was just the tip of the iceberg thanks to shoddy wiring from the previous owner. The buyers were left with a repair bill and the businesses renting space from them had to close doors until the repairs completed, and it turned into a long and messy job as stone after potentially lethal stone was upturned by the contractors.
Poorly operating or bare bones websites don’t kill anyone and thus they’re not regulated like the work of the electrical industry. The damage caused by a poorly built website is nothing. Literally nothing – and that’s the problem. They just sit there, occupying space. Like an employee who gets paid to simply turn up even though you totally expected them to earn their pay.
From experience I believe most businesses I talk to don’t understand what a small business website should do once it goes online and it reminds me of the dotcom crash at the beginning of the new millennium. Businesses believed that a website was somehow going to double their revenue without the overhead of rent or staff and they went all in. Investors smelled money and started ploughing capital into startups. And predictably it went tits up. But the result was the belief that websites don’t work and it hung like a dark cloud over the industry for a good many years after.
Businesses build their small business websites thinking like businesses
Businesses build their small business websites thinking like businesses and I assume those people who did their own wiring in their building approached it with the same mindset.
They did it themselves because they didn’t want to pay an electrician. They didn’t want to spend a penny more than they had to and when they hit an unknown they just left it rather than seeing it through. Leaving exposed wires in the ceiling. And then they may have left the property business, telling everyone who would listen that it’s overpriced and doesn’t work.
A website makes it real
There’s a slogan being thrown around at the moment that says “A website makes it real” and it does. It makes the work that follows real when that website goes online and how successfully your website is able to do that work depends on how well it’s built. Is your copy SEO optimized? No? Then you probably won’t get found search engines. Sorry but no. How fast does it load? Do you know?
Slow loading content gets penalized in the rankings war. New, fresh content not only shows you’re still invested in your website – it gives tells search engines your website is alive and impacts rankings, and it gives you new opportunities to reinforce what search engines find when they spider your content. Yep they spider – that’s how they do it. Clean clever content that’s fast, secure and confident when it tells search engines what they’re about with no exposed wires in the roof. And we’re just getting started. Can you build that? Do you have time to learn how to do that?
If you don’t then get a professional to do your website.
