It’s time to shake things up here in BeAwesomeOnlineLand. (Did you hear someone start playing Eye of the Tiger? Weird.) We’ve just completed two months of how-tos and daily 5-minute missions, and gotten to know a lot about you and where you’re at and you’ve let us know how we’ve helped you, and these are all awesome things and I want to keep doing them.
But.
Remember that colourful manifesto I wrote? It came from a serious and passionate part of myself that wants to burn down and jump on the ashes of every boring, useless, un-awesome website on the internet. So for the next month I am going to write about all the common wisdom of websites, and why much of it sucks a giant pile of ass.
(Also, I will probably using the phrase “giant pile of ass” more often. I’m being heretical and confrontational, whee!)
So here’s the first high treason, for which I may be ejected from Geektopia:
Technology is the least important part of your website.
I’ve given myself a small loophole here. For some websites, technology is very important: Amazon’s website would be much less popular without features that are heavily tech-reliant.
But you’re not Amazon, and neither am I. For my website, and for most websites, you could use 500 different tools for content management, design, integration etc etc etc and your visitors would neither notice nor care. Most website technology is Good Enough.
So that means that the hours upon hours you spend debating tools are wasted time. Worse than that, for a lot of people they’re an avoidance mechanism. I understand! This is scary stuff, but you’re approaching it wrong.
How most websites are started
1. Sarah decides to start a website for her dog-walking business.
2. She spends eighty-seven hours researching tools and technology.
3. She spends another thirty-six hours getting the tools and technology to work, floundering in a sea of PHP versions and database permissions and header margins.
4. Sarah finally has a website! Seventy-three hours later it looks sorta kinda the way she wants.
5. Completely worn out by the process, Sarah takes three hours to throw together a few sentences of content and calls it done.
Result? Sarah’s website sucks. The stuff people care about (information about dog walking and how to hire Sarah) is slapdash and thrown together, and because she was completely drained when she wrote it, it reads like a corporate manual. People leave after 15 seconds, but it doesn’t really matter because no-one finds the website anyway. Sarah has spent one hundred and ninety-nine hours on this website… and only 3 of them were on the unique value only she can provide. The most important task got left to the end when she was tired and burned out.
There’s a better way.
A better method to start a website
1. Sarah decides to start a website for her dog-walking business.
2. Sarah spends sixty hours writing articles for her website. She gathers testimonials and photos of excited dogs and a page of tips on how to keep your dog healthy in winter.
3. Sarah decides she doesn’t want to fuss around with technology for ages, so she hires Johnny B. Truant to create a totally decent website for $175. (Of course, if Sarah was a do-it-yourself kind of woman she’d buy the Website in a Weekend course and do it herself, but she doesn’t really want to know how it’s done. She just wants it to work.)
4. Three days later she has a website.
Result? Sarah’s website is awesome. It’s useful, it’s got lots of pictures, and loads of natural search engine optimisation. Because Sarah wrote the content at the beginning when she was at her most enthusiastic, the content is passionate and interesting and worth reading. She loves the website, and not in that I’ve-suffered-so-much-I-might-as-well-enjoy-it way. And as she writes more content and gradually adds new features, the website starts getting traffic. Sarah gets more dogs to walk. And the world is just a little better for it.
Your 5-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…
(You didn’t think the missions would go away, did you? Never!)
1. Choose one feature you haven’t added to your website yet. (If you haven’t started one, your list will be quite long. If you do have a website, I bet you still have a feature or five you haven’t implemented.)
2. Stop looking at the technology and spend some time planning what the tools are for.
- What questions will you ask in your survey?
- What fields do you need in your contact form, and how will you ask for them?
- What will your welcome email say?
- How will you describe yourself in your new profile?
This is a bigger post, and a new format. Please help with your feedback:
- Do you like the new longer posts?
- Do you want me to stop using the phrase “giant pile of ass”?
- Agree with the heresy?
- Have some other ideas to destroy?
- And most importantly, have you completed the 5-minute mission?