I wrote the below post a few days before our website launch but never posted it. We got busy trying to get the actual site up. In all we are really happy with how it turned out but we still have some work to do. We look forward to the comments and feedback now that we are officially out there.
------
We are days away from our initial website launch and, as we put the finishing touches on the site, I can't help but reflect on the decisions we’ve made that have gotten us to this point.
Like many new small businesses, we have accepted free help when available. One individual who’s been a huge support to us is my brother Stephen, our website developer. Quick shout out - check him out here: Greenstein Consulting. He'll create a killer website for you and, at no extra charge, tell you you're stupid. Oh, I kid. That's special treatment only brothers get.
Starting off, we had some very clear items we wanted to incorporate into our website. Being avid users of social media, we were insistent on our site incorporating as much social media as possible. And we’ve done just that. One social media item we are not sure how to utilize, though, is Facebook. It's easy to use for a personal account, but man they make it a pain to set up for a business. We'd write the whole thing off if they didn't have so many subscribers.
In our past lives, we both have had experience building websites, either writing the HTML code or working on a design with a developer. With that experience behind us, we thought creating our own website would be a piece of cake. Not exactly. We certainly had the knowledge in terms of what general things to include but here's where we got schooled big time: the back-end of the website. Basically, what's under the hood...what makes our website work. We finally had the website to a point where we thought it was good to go only to find out that we hadn't made sure it was put in a code that would give us the flexibility we need for the future. We need .php and have .html. What is that you ask? Everyone tells us something different. What the hell does php stand for? According to php.net, "PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML." I know what you're thinking - that clears things up. Needless to say we still have some learning to do, but what we have gathered is that php will allow us to have a dynamic website and just plain html makes our site static. Static = bad, dynamic = good.
Now, it's easy to sit back and say "why didn't your web developer advise you on this?" Fair question and to some extent a good point. However, as a small business owner you should NEVER fully trust a task to your vendor. At the end of the day, it is your job to know every aspect of what you are getting yourself into. We should have done the research to know what type of website we needed.
So, yes we got schooled. Our website has been delayed a few weeks and, once it's launched, we will have to fix some stuff behind the scenes. As stressful as this has been overall, it's good that it happened. I'd rather learn this lesson now than later, when serious time and money have been invested in the job.
At the end of the day, our website is going to be awesome and Stephen has been a huge help, but in the interest of full disclosure, these are some of the hiccups we've encountered along the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment