the goose

When we create our ideas, we usually look at the different requirements of the idea first. This might be business planning, bank/investor pitching, budgeting and such like.

Previously our first place to start might have been the traditional BP (Business Plan).

1. Grounding of thoughts

I have always said about a business plan that it is the best way to think about everything associated with your business. “If you can write it down”, I say, then you have thought about it in some detail and thus you have been able to work through at least some of the business problems or “gotchas”. Business plans are generally fluid documents that never get finished 100% and seldom get followed to the letter because a pitfall or unexpected success got in the way.

A website can do the same thing in this regard. You have to lay out the proposition in lay man’s terms and clear English. Everything has to be clear, concise and descriptive.

2. Testing the waters

It’s also a method for testing services with your customers. You can always claim a particular service in BETA.

A business plan does not allow you to do this to the same degree.

3. Starting the SEO early

In any web business most of us will know that it is very important that the website is as close as possible to top of the search rankings as possible.

There are many factors which push a site to the top of the rankings. An important one of these factors is the sites age. The more crawls that the site gets, the better your site will be ranked, provided you have added content on a regular basis and also made sure that your site has been constantly optimised. It is well thought that Google holds site age in particular high regards for its ranking system (at quote). Starting the website as the first thing that you do towards the business is quick, easy and relatively cheap to accomplish.

4. A framework for documentation, customer knowledge bases/open questions etc

When the website is written, you create all of the content that will appeal to the main ‘players’ in your business.

The players might be from a collection of different backgrounds and be involved with different parts of your business. For instance, you might have direct customers, channel partners and reseller, affiliates, and non-direct customers. All of these people need to have content that is written specifically for them. Each piece of content needs to be written in the business language of the person reading it and so by generating the content early, you are developing a complete set of documents that can be passed to the different players as standalone documents, brochures or marketing material.

Furthermore these documents require feedback from partners and customers. It is my experience that the first partners and customers of a business can be considered ‘friendly’ and that these people can be relied upon to provide good feedback on these documents through the website.

Lastly, if the website is developed on the back of a content management system, such as Wordpress, you are developing a complete documentation framework for your business at the same time as enhancing the website.

5. Discovery of customers

A business plan is generally a static document. You don’t show it to many people and you certainly don’t try and show it to your current customers. Therefore it’s very rare to get any really good constructive criticism from the production of the business plan unless you are paying consultants to look at it for you.
The production of a website puts all of your thoughts in one place. The public looks at it. Your target market might look at it (with careful adwords set up) too. Comments, popularity and statistics will all come to you from the start, rather than at the end of the project.

Final thoughts:

It doesn’t matter that the website is a bit rough around the edges so long as the content is good. I never like to see an under construction banner on websites, it says “I really can’t be bothered to finish this site”. Instead write content about the sites ongoing development and how excited your are that the site is going to end up great and well loved. This sounds much better.

I have found that writing the website can be more rewarding that writing the business plan in terms of business transacted.

Business plans take a lot of work and you are forced to make too many assumptions about your market and the types of customers that you will gain. Of course, if you are a renowned expert in your chosen industry then maybe you already have access to this sort of information, but any major assumptions that you make creates a business plan that will go out of date very quickly.

The plan becomes a lot easier to write when you eventually have to (I.E. to see the bank or an investor) because you can pull content from the site and also give references to it and show how much work that you’ve already put in to the idea.