When I think of buying a new car, I think of the price first and then think of all the added benefits to owning this car. I would argue that building your website is like buying a new car. We invest money to buy a machine to drive us to work everyday. We expect it to be reliable, startup each day and drive into an office where we can work to earn the money to pay for it. For most of us, a car is a multi-year long investment. The maintenance, oh the maintenance. Every car needs new tires, brakes, windshield wipers, oil changes, transmission fluid. It’s annoying, but we pay this knowing the car will drive us safely to work next week.
Your car drives you to work, but your website drives work to you.
This is no different than your website. The right website will drive business to you. Companies may save money for years in order to afford the website they want. Once you’ve bought the website and it’s online you expect it to be secure, reliable and to function in a way to serve you and your clients. Just like your car, your website needs updates; and it too requires maintenance, oh the maintenance. Each year, sometimes each month some updated code will be released. This could be a new plugin, a new update for WordPress, or an update to help the website render better on new mobile devices like Google Glass.
Every website should be evaluated with the same care used to decide on a car purchase. This is a long-term investment and we all want our website to make it the full 200k miles before it dies. Working in web design, I see many savvy people who think of their website in this way without even knowing it.
There are still companies sputtering along with a website from 1996. In their mind, the buttons work and it has a contact page. Why in the world are the visitors not contacting us? Well in short because your visitors show up at your door, hop in your ’96 escort and go for a slow and unpredictable ride around the block. Then they go home and talk quietly to themselves about the holes in the seats and the stains on the dashboard.
The right website will have a sporty hybrid in the driveway. Your visitors arrive to find roomy seats and a clean interior. They go for a ride around the block. By the end they want to know more about you and what you do. You must be doing something important in the industry to have this nice of a website.
