Today we had a call from someone we know. He is with a local organisation and he sounded desperate. So we agreed to have a Google Meet with him because sometimes the actual issue is hidden beneath the problem.
So the issue was that his company website had crashed and his boss wasn’t happy.
Digging deeper, we discovered that his previous developer had not updated the website since it was launched and they had used free plugins.
They tried to restore the old website but it didn’t work. And now they were getting desperate as they had launched an event promoting their programmes to the community and the community wanted to sign up at the website and couldn’t!
What would you make of such a problem?
This is why you must work with people that you trust not just to develop your website but can also manage and take good care of the website for you.
When we say manage, it is not merely updating the website with fresh news or content. It also means that it works well on the backend – the parts that are not visible. That’s a lot of trust you need to place in your website managers and website developers.
A lot of times this is the value that trusted website managers and developers bring to their clients. The ability to prevent problems like defective websites from happening is a value. There is no value in propping up or rescuing a website after it goes crashing.
Effective website managers prevent the problems from happening and that is what clients are paying for.
And this is why excellent website management services are priced at a premium and this also goes for the initial website development.
If the website development is too cheap, the web designer could be cutting a lot of corners (getting free plugins or using free software that could hide a bunch of bugs) and in the end you the client will end up paying the price for opting for the cheapest provider.
So how do you prevent yourself from getting into this sticky situation?
Spend time talking to your potential website developer/manager/designer and ask questions about the worst case scenario. No one likes talking about worst case scenarios or exit strategies or what happens when the website crashes or dies or when you want to move away to another web host. But if you want to prevent problems, ask them how they resolved these issues or if they have come across such issues.
Don’t just fixate on the cheapest provider of the service. If it is cheap now, it could be 100x more expensive later when things go wrong.
Here are 2 ways to get more ideas for your business:
1. Get our book, Web Wisdom, to understand how you can set up your website to attract the right customers into your business
2. Get ideas via email.