The Cute Puppy
It's love at first sight. Instantly you can see yourself doing all sorts of wonderful things together and on impulse you buy it because it's not expensive. Alternatively it might have been a gift from a well-meaning family member or friend. Either way, it was irresistable.
You can just visualise how it will behave after you've trained it. It's cute and it looks so well kept and healthy. The costs and inconvenience of owning it don't even figure in your thinking.
Pretty soon, though, you realise what you've done. The pup's disobedient, veterinary costs are high; it eats you out of house and home and leaves a mess wherever it goes. If you're unlucky it's unsuitable for your lifestyle and gets in the way of everything you want to do. If you're really unlucky it might grow so large and eats so much that you can no longer afford to keep it
It might even become a real mongrel, a tail chaser, scrounger or an over-enthusiastic guard dog.
The Cute Puppy website
In some ways cute puppy websites are like designer websites, because their initial attraction is based on little more than their looks. Sometimes they're built by an enthusiastic but narrowly-focussed designer who can't think past the imagery on the home page.
A puppy website is often created by a well-meaning friend, relative or acquaintance who knows a little bit about computers or has design flair. You accept because it's cheap, convenient and you trust your friend to know what they're doing. They certainly don't warn you of the costs and problems you're likely to run into later on.
A puppy website is characterised by what happens when you realise that you want the site to do something productive for your business. Then you discover that it wasn't built to develop into anything more than the pup it started out as. When you need help you find that the seller has disappeared, your acquaintance is too busy or what you received was the limit of your friend's ability.
Search engine optimisation won't help either - if the website doesn't work now, making it more visible or sending more visitors to it will only turn them into disappointed prospects.
One thing's for sure about cute puppy websites - they do more harm than good for their owners.
Are you about to buy a cute puppy website?
Signs that you could be buying a cute puppy dog:
- The provider doesn't have business insight.
- Complementary off-line business strategies are not asked about.
- Conversations centre on good looks instead of business outcomes.
- You're not asked about business goals and strategies.
- You're not asked about your customers and their needs.
- The website sounds really cheap.
- The provider talks as if having a successful website is about programming, computers, graphic design and IT.
How to ensure a thoroughbred website
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