Building and launching an online business can be a very similar to preparing and bringing a child into the world. We spend so much time planning for its arrival, reading books, birthing classes, and employing health care specialists for the delivery. It’s a very exciting lead up – there is a lot of excitement about how your lives will change once it arrives. So many new parents fall into the pitfall of planning for the arrival, the birth. But that is just a moment in time. It’s what happens next that you really need to be prepared for. If only you already had training & experience in child care! Unless you hire a qualified nanny, you’re now left to do it pretty much on your own – sink or swim.
I’m likening child birth to the creation and launch of an online business. We spend so much time in the preparation and launch phases and, we don’t look forward to what we need for its future. When that website launches, just like a child we can’t let it go off into the big bad world on its own, we need to continue to nurture it. We see it time and time again, clients with a gleam in their eye at the thought of their website; so much change and opportunity. Once it launches it’s expected to go from crawling to leaping and bounding all on its own. Building it is just the birthing stage; it’s the ongoing commitment, and I mean commitment that goes in afterwards that makes your website work for you and your business. Unlike new parents, you don’t have to sink or swim; luckily you can go full speed ahead with the right people and the right vision.
Let’s look at it from another angle; once you have your new glossy, fabulous website, there are two paths it can go down:
1. You have an online specialist who is highly capable, hard working and passionate about what they do, not only are they going to help you maintain the site, but optimise it for ongoing technological advancements, improve the customer experience and foresee the needs of your online store (if you have one). You may also have a marketing specialist who is strategising to do whatever it takes to ‘lead the horse to water’. You’ll have an evolving strategy of how to lead new visitors to your website and convert them in to customers.
2. Well the other road – is when you’re website is left under minimal supervision and expertise. You may have some level of support – to put out any technological fires and update information; however not only is the financial investment not there, neither is the human investment. You’ve got the bare bones but you don’t have fully-fleshed qualified professionals who are passionate about your business and your success.
A lot of businesses fall into the trap of not seeing the true value of their online business. It comes down to just that, in the hands of the right person; that bright, shiny new website can be an investment. Or left in the hands of a less visionary person, what was a new, sharp website, after it’s initial sheen, has been left unattended, unnoticed and very soon in the need for a major overhaul. Yep, you’re back to where you started – back full circle into planning the refresh of your website. Can you believe you’re back here again? You didn’t see it coming did you?
