Website fail

My girlfriend Michelle, is a psychologist and she recently f*cked her website up because she manages it herself. She’s very smart. She has a PhD. She likes me to call her ‘Doctor Hanisch’ sometimes. She’s not unintelligent. She’s a very capable psychologist. She’s known in her field. She’s known for being very good at her job but she’s not (just like I’m not) a website management and maintenance and development person. But she’s chosen to do her own and I think the lesson I want to draw from this is – although you can do your own, you leave yourself at risk of not doing a great job. And that’s what happened to Michelle.

Now, you might know that Google has decided, in its wisdom, that if you don’t have a security certificate on your site and if it doesn’t say HTTPS rather than just the old HTTP, it’s going to mark your site as not safe or not secure. And in fact, some time ago, it started demoting you in the rankings if you weren’t secure. Now, it’s gone further and said, ‘you’re going to a not safe site – do not enter here”. So poor Michelle noticed a few weeks ago that she wasn’t getting so many enquiries from her website. When investigating further, SEO rankings had dropped and she had to go looking and take action to fix it up.

It’s very frustrating for Michelle and I think the lesson I want to share with you is that neither you, nor I, nor Michelle are website people (and just like you would say, “Jon, don’t try and build your own house, you will make terrible mistakes and you will be unhappy with the result”), I want to say to you as trades business owners – stick to what you’re amazing at and don’t try and do your own website.

What to do?

1. Don’t try to do the things you’re not especially skilled at. Outsource them to the experts. You have a better chance of things not going wrong if you’ve got somebody reasonably expert looking after it for you.

Now, I made a video a while back (and we will reference it in the blog below) about the different building blocks of a website, because there’s quite a lot to a website and if you just go and build a Wix one, you’ll get a website that looks nice but might not bring you many leads, might not do well in the search rankings, might not get it’s security patches updated, things like that. So there’s quite a lot to do. If you want to talk to your web people about whether they’re doing all the things that are required, you’re going to have to watch that video.

Recommended Reading: Is your website performing well? Questions for your web people.

2. Go and look at your website and in the address bar at the top. See if it says HTTPS and if it does you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, if it says, ‘not secure’, go and get that fixed up. Get on to your web people. If you don’t have any web people, give me a call and I’ll put you on to mine.

3. Don’t do everything yourself. That’s not your job. When I’m coaching people, we spend quite a lot of time looking at where my customers spend their time so that they can spend it on the important job that requires them and on the work of growing and developing their business. Then we offload the things that are better done by somebody more expert. We offload those to those experts. Now, we can’t do that all at once because experts cost money, and technicians cost money, so we do it in a measured and managed fashion, but really that’s the gist of it.

So, if you want some help with that, of course you know what to do. Get in touch and say, “Jon, I spend too much time trying to do everything myself. Help me manage my way out of that”.

See you later.