{4:20 minutes to read} One of my favorite blog article ideas on blogbrainstormer.com is in the client Q&A section. It’s often dubbed the “Anti-Success Story” or the “I-Told-You-So Story.”
As an advisor to others, you may have had an opportunity to tell your clients not to do something, but for whatever reason, they went ahead and did it, leaving you to clean up the mess. While that can lead to greater billing and, in some ways, reinforces your expertise and wise counsel, it can also be a scenario or lesson you can present to others in a blog article. Of course, it’s important to do it without being smug or revealing anything private, confidential or otherwise embarrassing to your client.
The opposite is also true in terms of telling the client to do something. For whatever reason, they don’t and, once again, you find yourself cleaning up a mess that could have been prevented. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and may be a valuable vaccine to prevent frustrations down the road.
Either way, it’s not best for the client.
Sometimes, tough lessons are learned the hard way.
The phoneBlogger.net service doesn’t design websites. If anything, we do any necessary “website remodeling” during the setup month. When necessary, we set up blog sites and can add static pages to a blog website, thus mimicking a traditional website. That can suffice as a starter website for a new or small practice but is different and much less than what a traditional website designer/development firm would do.
However, because of our insight into marketing and website development, we can be used as a sounding board whenever you are thinking of redesigning your website. A redesign is sometimes necessary to keep up with mobile developments like Google’s so-called “Mobilegeddon” (April 2015): Google announced that they will be punishing websites that are not mobile-friendly by demarking them through their mobile search engines.
There are also design & aesthetic trends that may be important to keep up with in your own practice area or your own special aesthetic and brand. But for the most part, “improving” a website is a quagmire that I prefer clients avoid and delay as long as possible. A website that doesn’t look all that pretty, but is extremely functional, is a lot more useful than one that looks beautiful but doesn’t do much or give much value to the end user.
Craigslist is a perfect example: It prides itself on its rather boring and dizzy layout—that’s become a badge of honor for them. All the while, startups and upstart law practices spend thousands and thousands of dollars on something that looks beautiful, yet is ineffective. There’s greater value in directing those $1000s into marketing channels in order to get the word out there, rather than on website aesthetics.
To that point, we warn, if not counsel, our clients to talk to us first before they engage in a website redesign. Not because we want to do it ourselves or refer to our preferred relationships but, rather, to put them on the right path. It’s less work for us and definitely less costly for our clients.
Tune in for Part 2 to discover what kinds of errors we’ve seen others make when redesigning their company website.
Vikram Rajan, Co-Founder
Telephone: (888) 952-4630
Email: Vik@phoneBlogger.net
Website: phoneBlogger.net
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