It took me a while to get the courage to write this post — that is, to tell you that your website, new or redesign, will probably fail. In fact, there’s a 65-80% chance. But wait, there’s more! It may fail multiple times! That’s right, there is a reasonable chance you will experience multiple failures after your website goes live. Now, before you get up in arms, let me explain.
WHY DO WEBSITES FAIL?
Let’s start with describing what a failure is, with context. In our industry, if a website doesn’t make your business better — doesn’t make your business grow — much less makes it worse, then it’s a failure. In fact, it’s so likely to fail one or more times out of the gate that we plan for it. If you’ve worked with a web designer or digital marketing agency in the past, that may not be your experience. We hear a lot of stories about one-and-done projects. That is, you pay someone to create a website for your company, they work with you to create a pretty design, they put some SEO in place to help you rank in search results, and maybe even offer a few more value-added services. But, they forget something critical in this process — testing.