Small Business - Take Control of Your Life
Maybe that’s a rather strong headline but just lately the fact that so many small businesses let others control their lives has been bothering me.
Actually I thought I was over it but something I was reading about a technical gadget brought it back to me. Some firm has come up with an incredible little gadget that’s a bit like carrying a slideshow in your pocket and further information is available by filling in a form on their website.
Unfortunately the form doesn’t work - probably because whoever designed the site was in too great a rush. So now they have a great product and they’re probably wondering why no one is asking them about it. Problems like that can happen when you let other people from outside your business take control.
What really got me thinking about it was a cup of coffee I had with Toni at our favourite cafe. I was sitting there waiting for Toni to arrive when the owner whose afriend mentioned that the cafe now has it’s own website. He said that it was designed by friends in the web design business and it was pretty obvious that he had just told them to design him a website and left them to do it.
So I was interested to see what it looked like and as soon as I got home and into my office I typed in the URL.
And it was genuinely terrible. The splash page was even less interesting than a wet dish cloth. Someone had decided that the site needed a lot of Javascript but it didn’t work, links that were supposed to point to other pages in the site pointed to nothing and images were being called up from some other site that had nothing to do with the cafe.
If you are going to get someone to do some work for you maintain some control over it. If you don’t understand the work that has to go into job get them to explain it. Call them to account for why they are doing things and if they won’t tell you, or can’t tell you then make them stop till they can or will.
Keep control of your small businesses life and don’t let others destroy what you have worked so hard to achieve.
Our friend the cafe owner did just that - he wanted a website that would advertise the good food, great coffee and fun that people can have when they go to his cafe. Instead what he got was something that will turn people away.
