Why should I want to have more control over my own website?
Small Business folks have a full plate. Business Coaches, Consultants and "online experts" are constantly telling them to outsource what they can and part of that typically includes the complex world of a website. If that's what your Coach is telling you, you may want to find a new Coach. While fully managing a website isn't for everyone, not having a decent finger on the pulse of yours is a sure way to lose control of it eventually.
For this conversation, my primary audience at this time is wellness professionals or others with brick and mortar presence who are not seeking to buy and sell goods via their website at this time. If your business is similar this may also fit. If you are in the e-commerce realm this may not fit, but don't overlook some of these pieces as they may be still apply.
Reasons to manage your own website:
Controlling your website and your web presence does not necessarily mean creating content. If you really stink at writing, or if you stink at putting together information in a simple cognitive manner, get help with that. Once you've gotten help, at very least learn to paste that into your website yourself so you could then make very minor edits or corrections on the fly.
Ultimately you may never be able to truly understand the benefits of controlling your own website until you've tried it. Experience is the greatest teacher. But once you try it and get the hang of it, I'll bet you'd settle for a simpler website under your own control vs a complex website under someone else's control any day of the week.
For this conversation, my primary audience at this time is wellness professionals or others with brick and mortar presence who are not seeking to buy and sell goods via their website at this time. If your business is similar this may also fit. If you are in the e-commerce realm this may not fit, but don't overlook some of these pieces as they may be still apply.
Reasons to manage your own website:
- Stress Management -- How many times have you heard a small business owner say, "Yeah I need to add that to my website but I just haven't had time to get that to my web developer" or better yet, "I had a website up but the developer disappeared".
- Cost -- In days gone by you either got the neighbors kid to do a website and no matter how good or bad that started it seldom ended well OR you had a professional do it for a cost that was astronomical, and often times the final result years down the road was still a bust. And seldom did anyone want to pay developer rates for the incremental updates that make a website a great resource.
- Efficiency -- If you control your website and you can edit it in a cost effective manner, do things with it to save you time in ways you can't really imagine right now without control.
- Flexibility -- If you control your website and you can edit it in a cost effective manner, you can do things with it to benefit your business in flexible ways you can't really imagine right now without control.
- Profitability -- If you control your website and you can edit it in a cost effective manner, you can do things from a marketing and efficiency perspective that provide profit for time invested that is second to none as it can be like having a part time employee working 24/7 with none of the cost or headache.
- Incremental Progress -- If you control your website and you can edit it in a cost effective manner, you can take teeny tiny steps daily with your website that you just can't do when you are working with others, and over time all of those steps add up in ways you can not imagine if you are limited to taking larger steps that always must fit into someone else's schedule.
Controlling your website and your web presence does not necessarily mean creating content. If you really stink at writing, or if you stink at putting together information in a simple cognitive manner, get help with that. Once you've gotten help, at very least learn to paste that into your website yourself so you could then make very minor edits or corrections on the fly.
Ultimately you may never be able to truly understand the benefits of controlling your own website until you've tried it. Experience is the greatest teacher. But once you try it and get the hang of it, I'll bet you'd settle for a simpler website under your own control vs a complex website under someone else's control any day of the week.
A living resource...
A website being controlled by a reasonably competent owner is a living resource. It can work for you much like a horse pulling a plow, a goat weeding the brush, or a tree providing shade. And while many may instantly go to the idea of "marketing", that is in fact but a small portion of what I hope small business folks get from their website.
A vegetable plant is a living resource. It needs to be watered and cared for. It needs to be tended to, and it needs to be pruned regularly to look as good as it can and should, and if you don't have the ability to go in and modify portions of your website with great ease, it is typically not cost effective to maintain it as it should be maintained. And in such cases, what can be a great workhorse for you becomes a prickly cactus. And while many cacti are pretty and some even bloom, they don't provide the shade of a small tree in bloom nor the output of a horse or a goat.
At this point in time web-based website building tools have evolved to the point that Small Business people with mediocre computer skills are fully capable of managing the framework and content of their own websites to a degree few could have imagined even a few years ago. Take advantage of that and gain some experience managing these great resources, and you will likely begin to realize what you've been missing all these years when things related to website managment were just a little more complex.
A vegetable plant is a living resource. It needs to be watered and cared for. It needs to be tended to, and it needs to be pruned regularly to look as good as it can and should, and if you don't have the ability to go in and modify portions of your website with great ease, it is typically not cost effective to maintain it as it should be maintained. And in such cases, what can be a great workhorse for you becomes a prickly cactus. And while many cacti are pretty and some even bloom, they don't provide the shade of a small tree in bloom nor the output of a horse or a goat.
At this point in time web-based website building tools have evolved to the point that Small Business people with mediocre computer skills are fully capable of managing the framework and content of their own websites to a degree few could have imagined even a few years ago. Take advantage of that and gain some experience managing these great resources, and you will likely begin to realize what you've been missing all these years when things related to website managment were just a little more complex.