The old way

The 123Live way

January

A lot of excitement at getting the new website off the ground. Everyone's buzzing with ideas.

A lot of excitement at getting the new website off the ground. Everyone's buzzing with ideas.

February

The website you have had planned for so long is now live. It looks great and everyone's chuffed to bits.

The website you have had planned for so long is now live. It looks great and everyone's chuffed to bits.

You get a bit irritated by a few niggly typos. Print off the offending pages with the intention of correcting them and posting to web designer. Run out of day.

Use 123live to correct a few niggly typos and fine tune some of the wording.

April

While on holiday you show off your website to some new friends in an internet cafe. Slightly embarrassed by February's special offers still being on the home page.

While on holiday you show off your website to some friends in an internet cafe. Notice that your secretary has added two more testimonials to the site.

Have a brainwave about adding an FAQ page.

May

Come back from holiday and call your web designer about getting some changes made to the site, but he's away for a couple of weeks and will be quite busy when he gets back. Pencil in a meeting for July.

Come back from holiday and ask Andy in technical to add the new FAQ page.

Add some extra keywords that the sales team came up with after a brainstorming session at the pub.

Decide to liven up the home page with the new product shots you took today.

June

Call the local college to ask about evening classes to learn web page design after talking to someone who suggested that the only way to make sure your website is up to date is to learn about HTML and something called javascript.

Andy's FAQ page is proving a hit with customers and the technical team are getting fewer calls.

Decide to ask Mary in marketing to make a new page just for press releases. Mary thinks that's a great idea.

July

You're sure that you could reduce the workload on your technical team if only you had some sort of FAQ page. Make a note to talk to your web designer about it.

Had that meeting with the web designer. They'll look into the FAQ thing and get back to you. Meanwhile they'll do your updates soon.

Janet took a snap of Peter the new salesman and put it on the website with a little biography. Customers seem to like these personal touches.

Staff are forever preening themselves in case you whip out the camera.

August

Learn about keywords at nightschool and are sure they could help somehow.

Web designer does the updates, (only took three months) but now you see it on your website you want to change things a bit.

Got the web designer's bill and decide not to change anything for a whle.

Notice that your site is coming up more often in search engine listings because of the new keywords you added.

Notice that you are saving money on catalogues, as many people now get the info from the website.

Make a new home page this morning. It's a bit 'off the wall' and some of the staff think you've lost the plot, but if it doesn't work you know you can switch back to the old one in minutes.

September

Web design classes not going too well. It's all rather boring and more than a little bit confusing.

Decide that web designers do earn their money after all.

Feel rather smug when your old boss complained about how difficult it is to get his website updated.

Very pleased at proving the doubters wrong, the new home page featuring the MD doing the 'balloon dance' is working miracles for sales and gets some unexpected press coverage.

October

Look at your web stats and find that your visitors look at your site for an average of 3.7 seconds. You think it's because the information is always three months old, but don't they realise how difficult it is to keep a website up to date?

Peter didn't work out unfortunately so delete him from the website.

Web stats show that you are getting a lot more people coming to your website. They like the FAQ page and the 'new products' page you added back in July.

November

Seem to be forever sending out memos on product updates. What happened to the 'paperless office'.

Don't really like to mention the website to customers. It's so out of date it's a bit of a liability.

Staff seem to like being able to get current information straight from the website.

Becoming a bit of a bore at dinner parties. Your spouse says all you can talk about is how every business should get a website with 123live.

December

Decide that this whole website thing is a waste of time and energy. Nobody's taking any interest in it anymore, not even you. There are so many changes needed you'll have to start all over again.

Looking foward to a longer than usual break at Christmas.