Website Chaos & Lessons Learned 🙇🏻♀️
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Hello Reader, My newsletter this week was supposed to be about how to deal with complaints in your business. I have a whole bunch of handy tips I was excited to share, but... that was not meant to be. Instead, all those plans were derailed by an emergency move of my website from one platform to another. Fun stuff, right? I’m not going to go into the details is why this is necessary, but to say that it was just a few days from the whole thing falling apart due to issues way beyond my control is accurate. (Basically but tech companies fighting with each other. 🙄) Fortunately, with my schedule super packed, Josh was able to do a lot of the hard work, particularly a ton of manual migration of blog posts—I'm so appreciative and fortunate that we can do this in-house, because I know that's not the case for most people. So that was a whole project. But as someone who used to design a lot of websites (I’ve literally launched hundreds for clients), wow, was it ever a reminder of how stressful this undertaking—and any large project—really is. From this chaos, I did find some good reminders and I thought it might be helpful to share if you're undertaking any overwhelming project in your business. Done is Better Than Perfect: This is a probably overused mantra I’ve repeated to myself countless times (raise your hand if you're always hearing the siren song of perfectionism 🙋🏻♀️), and it couldn’t be more relevant in this case. There are undoubtedly a few broken links and the mobile site is a bit wonky in spots, but it’s live and it's no longer looming as this potentially catastrophic problem. It’s off our plates. Most importantly, we’re no longer facing the constant threat of attacks from jerks who have nothing better to do that bombard websites with garbage. Now, there might be a few people who find a broken link or two and decide that I, well, suck. And that’s fine. That means they’re not my people, and that’s great. I hope they find someone who meets their standards. Prioritize Wisely: One of the biggest lessons I was reminded of—and it's one I talk to clients about a whole lot—during this process is the importance of setting priorities. I’ve been tracking my website’s performance for years, fortunately, and I know that a significant portion of my sales come from my blog, particularly about twenty or so specific posts. So, Josh and I spent the majority of our time ensuring that our top-performing blog posts were migrated smoothly and continued to function as they should with their marketing funnels intact and URLs properly redirected since we also had a small URL structure change. The case studies also were heavily prioritized because I know that people read them prior to reaching out (because I ask!). There were other things that were lower priority, a couple of services pages that were on the old site currently don’t exist on the new one, for example. And that’s fine because they didn’t fit into our high-level priorities according to the data. You can't do it all—pick the things that matter most. Brand Voice is Always Evolving: My website was a bit of a patched together mess, a legacy of my old agency site with a few changes to shit the focus onto consulting—because I never found the time to actually update the whole thing. (This is incredibly common, so if this is you, you're not alone!) So, as we were going through the migration process, I realized that a lot of my messaging and tone was almost there, but it wasn’t quite right. Because of this realization, the bulk of my limited time on this project was rewriting. The bones were there, but the voice was just a smidgen off. It's funny how much better having more of my own nerdy phrasing and voice on the site makes me feel. People know what they're going to get when they read the words for sure! While this wasn't the planned newsletter, I hope my sharing this experience is helpful. One of my goals of this newsletter is to share the weird and annoying things I deal with so you know that when you deal with your weird and annoying stuff, it's not just you! Talk soon, Sarah P.S. Now that this website debacle is done and dusted, I'm now booking the very last of my 2024 clients. Get in touch here. |