I won’t dwell yet again on the websites of the 2000s, their deliciously outdated Christmas-tree look, their bright colors and their legendary usability.
This time, I really mean all websites, including the real ones, paid for at full price and built by competent professionals. Websites that are said to look good, that convert visitors into leads, and that are even optimized for organic search. In short, good websites.
In reality, it’s not websites that are useless; it’s buying them the way you buy a product, with a requirements document defined and features set in stone, until the next redesign, which will often consist of buying a new site based on the failure of the previous one. The cleverest do add a line to the requirements document about the need for the site’s “scalability,” but that remains wishful thinking.
Needs that are constantly changing
In the web world, nobody knows in advance what the needs will be in 6 months. A concrete example: if your 100% compliant site is delivered at time T and Google releases its “+1” button at T+1 (day, week, month…), you have earned the right to call your provider back to upgrade the site. And count on them to give you an “appropriate” price for this optional service.
And there will be many similar situations:
- You will have to continually adapt your content and be ready to question the very structure of the site based on feedback, meaning traffic statistics (and above all, their analysis). That requires know-how and a proactive approach. Who will handle it once your site has been delivered?
- New functional needs regularly appear as the company develops: integration with Facebook, a new tracking tool more relevant to your business, web services, an online store… but you still need to know that these options exist and will be useful to you.
Those who created a requirements document and paid for a website once and for all will have an even harder time questioning their new jewel: the budget is gone, too much time has already been lost defining everything in detail and thinking through everything in advance. Most will not call their provider again for months, and the site will not evolve during that time.
Continuous improvement vs. illusory perfection
But the web is a tremendous playground: tools exist to measure everything in real time. So it is better to start with something average and end up with a suitable tool than to embark on the (costly) quest for perfection, a perfection that is relative anyway.
One solution would be to have in-house skills to evolve your web presence, but that is not necessarily justified for an SME (by the way, never hire social media specialists)
Buy a service that makes sense for you
The solution: don’t buy websites anymore. Instead, offer your provider a performance-based contract. Set business objectives and let them define the actions to implement to achieve them. Give them a stake in the results, and commit to a long-term relationship built on trust. You’ll see, you will no longer have to worry about scalability, choose the shade of the banner, or discuss the price of the update. And who knows, it may be the best source of growth for your company.
A monthly service is not a performance-based contract
A useful clarification: buying a service does not mean “buying a website for a monthly flat fee”, something like “hosting, 3 changes per month, email inbox and monthly statistics report” for 150 euros per month.
