Accept failure
No-one gets their first website right. Can’t be done. Iiiiiiiiim-possible. Too many things can be wrong, you see? The content doesn’t suit the audience. The platform is unusable. No-one can spell the domain name. The graphics are ugly. The hosting fails. The wrong keywords got optimised. Nobody cares about the topic. Everybody cares, and the server crashes.
Once you understand this, it’s freeing. Seriously! Stop delaying until you think everything’s prepared. Accept that it’s not going to be right, and ensure the cost of failure is low.
Fail inexpensively
It’s going to take a few iterations to iron out the bugs, so don’t start with a $4,000 professionally designed website. Start cheap. Buy a domain name and a $10/month hosting solution, install WordPress, and start getting things wrong. (If you’re worried about the technical stuff, pay Johnny to install WordPress for you. It’s only $100!) Put on a basic theme from the directory and don’t waste your time tweaking it. Spend all your time getting content written (either doing it yourself, or hiring someone else).
Fail invisibly
Don’t even tell anyone you’ve started a website to start with. Don’t get it printed on your business cards yet, and don’t paint it on your van. Way too many businesses promote the living bejeezus out of an “Under Construction” page, not thinking that most of their customers will visit it, be manifestly unimpressed, and never, ever return. Test-drive the domain name. Add more content. Ask your friends’ opinions. Ask your (helpful) customers’ opinions. Keep a list of all the problems they describe:
- Why don’t you have a logo?
- The domain name sucks!
- The site looks kinda ugly
- Don’t you want to sell more than twenty products?
- I want to customise the products
- The keywords don’t match the pages
- I don’t understand the product descriptions
- Why can’t I pay for it on the website?
- You need more contact options
- The content isn’t very helpful
- You’ve targeted the wrong audience
- I can’t find anything on the website
- I can’t read it on my iPhone
- I want to subscribe but there’s no option to
(This list is almost entirely from my first website. It’s not comprehensive: I made a LOT more mistakes than that.)
Learn from failure
First, prioritise the problems. You can do this by a few criteria, whatever suits you:
a. Most effective first
b. Shortest first
c. Longest first
d. Cheapest first
e. Most expensive first
Then, turn them into a to-do list, complete with time and expense estimates if you like to be prepared.
A better kind of failure
Three things can happen:
Just Add Water: You might need to invest some money in it, to buy a better theme or get some content written, but you’re got a good baseline to begin with. Awesome.
It’s time to take Old Yeller behind the barn: lucky you haven’t invested much in it, hey? Copy any content worth saving and then kill it and start again, potentially under a new domain name. It’ll be MUCH faster the second time around, I promise.
You’re gonna need a bigger boat: maybe you need a dedicated e-commerce solution, or a highly-customised interactive Java-driven applet, or some other feature that WordPress just can’t provide. Copy all the useful content and start shopping around for a web developer. Take along your to-do list and make sure the proposed solution meets the needs you’ve identified.
Whichever option you use, a whole big bunch of new problems will crop up as soon as you’ve made a change. Go through the process again until the website is Good Enough. Then launch with fanfare, and business cards, and special deals, and cake!
While you’re eating the cake, put a date in your calendar… in four to six months, you have to do it all over again. This sounds hard, this IS hard, but it’s the price of having an awesome website that makes you money.