Your Online Superheroes
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25 Years of being Online
I am celebrating today 25 years of being online.
I spent most of last week answering questions from my followers on LinkedIn and here is the complete set.
What is your favourite success story?
The one I always find myself telling goes back to 2020. We were all in lockdown and Zoom networking meetings had taken off.
I was in a local networking group that met together every other week. The chairman announced that one of our fellow members was going to close her business because of rising costs.
Amanda is normally a very bubbly outgoing person, so this behaviour was out fo character. I spoke to Amanda and found that her pain point was the “web team” who currently were hosting and looking after her website. Basically they were trying to charge her £200 for something she didn’t even use. Also when it came to web changes, they had to be asked at least a few times and even then would be charged a silly amount.
I went through Amanda’s website in full review mode. Give or take a few sections that needed better utilisation of space, the site was alright. Plus my pricing wasn’t cheap but I made it clear what was necessary and how long it would all take.
So Amanda instructed me to take over looking after the website. The fun kind of started then. This other company was not willing to pass on any files of the website, plus no one could access the back end. If you could imagine a 4 year old gripping their favourite toy, turning their back on you and screaming “mine!”. This was what we were dealing with.
So Amanda left it for a few weeks, which was just enough time for me to copy the artwork and files across and in effect rebuild the back and front end of the website.
In the end it was just a case of changing the domain name server and telling this company “thank you but no thank you”
Amanda continued to live her dream of running an online shop from home while her children were growing up. Last year she did cease trading because it was her plan to go back to full time work once the children had grown up.
Not all our my stories have a sugar-coated fairytale ending, but being able to give someone the freedom to run their business for 5 years more than if they threw in the towel, is why I choose this as my best story.
Did you ever think you would be trading as long as you have been?
The honest answer? No not really.
I started off DVH Design in 2000 part-time at home, because being newly married, having children was inevitable. For the first year I purely worked evenings.
Babies happened in the first few years of trading and honestly pre-2004, I thought web designers would disappear as quickly as they were created.
Oh boy, how wrong I was. But in a good way 😎
The way I see it is by about 2004/5 every business had a website, but around this time, some of the businesses who had a website quite early on, took a look at their creation and thought “My God what have I done?”
A lot of these was Frontpage based websites. Which in comparison is like using page builders now.
Twinned with the businesses that got a friend of a friend of their mate to do their website and it was now completely unusable. In fact, one of my earliest projects was a loca charity who did just that. To the extent that every section on the page was exactly placed and had a height and width declared.
Which sounded great at the time, but when they wanted to change content, all the sections collided with each other making it unreadable.
I’m proud to say that I still look after the charity’s website even 20 years and 3 rebuilds later.
Search Engine Optimisation was a natural transition and has certainly helped me grow my business. So has offering regular maintenance services ideal to keeping websites performing at an optimum level while keeping everything secure.
Although my journey so far hasn’t all been plain sailing (I’m no longer married), but even after 25 years, I am still a) learning and b) always striving to improve my services.
What is the best lesson you have learned?
I have learned a heck of a lot in my 25 years of trading, but the thing that saved my business and gave me a better reputation was asking for a deposit upfront prior to commencing any web project. I will explain.
Within about a couple of years of being a web designer and juggling children and work, there was a few companies that either had ridiculous payment terms (that thought payment within 90 days was perfectly acceptable) or ones that did a runner when the project was finished. There was also a few that went full-scale Karen (or Kevin) because they suddenly decided they wanted their website in 2 weeks and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do this.
This way made me question everything and I did wonder whether I wanted to continue working for myself. Being the go-to person to patronise, certainly wasn’t anywhere on my agenda.
Thankfully, after getting some much needed advice from other web designers and business owners, I opted to ask for a portion of the money upfront. This certainly changed things for the better. A couple of chancers tried their luck early on but I wasn’t budging.
I still get late payers but thats an easier pill to swallow than someone who cheats you out of about £500 (This was going back to the noughties).
What’s the strangest website you’ve ever done?
I’ve had a few: In the past I’ve worked on everything from a greyhound syndicate setup to a tantric massage agency. I even have a website that I currently look after for two rock fans review festivals and albums as a hobby.
The websites I end up rebuilding, I read through their content. In these years I have learned a lot. From conditions that are the opposite of diabetes to how intumescent door seals work. From ISO accreditations to the various car parts on post-war Rolls Royces.
I am very open minded, but I do tend to steer clear of the next Music Magpie, AliBaba, ebay and so on. In my experience they, tend to run away from quotes higher than a few hundred. It’s almost like they read the first page and then the last page of their inspiration’s autobiography.
I’m always up for a good idea and something original but doable. But in my honest opinion, every website is unique. If not it should be.
Bonus Question: So What’s next?
Ooo. That is a tough one. I would love to say I will trade 25 years more, but I will be 76 by then! As far as long-term goes, even I don’t know the answer to that one.
All I can promise is that I will continue to strive to improve the services I offer and make websites, quicker, alluring and more secure. I would like to push the Build Your own website course a lot more (the programme for startup businesses).
All I can really say is watch this space.
