The benefits of having a website for your business are well known, but whether you’re building a new site or revamping an existing one, the process can easily get overwhelming. You can quickly find yourself getting bogged down with changing the content, tinkering with the navigation and playing with the colour scheme, and before you know it you’ve been sitting on a half-finished website for 6 months while your business labours in vain and your main competitors profit.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By making a few simple decisions with speed and clarity, it’s possible to have a website designed and launched in a single afternoon. Which is why we want to talk about the benefits of being decisive.
Decisiveness
Decisiveness is a highly desirable skill, especially when it comes to running a business. Few people put their trust in a person who overthinks and protracts the most basic of decisions – it makes us question their knowledge and experience. We’re far more likely to put our trust in a person who knows where they’re going and who can make clear, confident decisions, than to put our faith in somebody who is paralysed by indecision.
Of course, the benefits of being decisive are not restricted to business. Indecision can be exhausting so decisiveness conserves both our physical and our emotional energy. It helps us to reduce procrastination, become more productive and organised, and gives us a greater peace of mind by eliminating anxiety and improving our confidence.
So how does this relate to web design? Well, when it comes to decisions regarding your website, being decisive gives you two huge benefits: reduced costs and faster delivery.
Reduced Costs
The first benefit is obvious to those who are working on an hourly rate, but it can also affect clients who are working on a project fee, as there’s likely to be a clause in the contract that specifies the number of changes and redesigns you can make per project.
By being wishy-washy with the plans for your website and constantly changing direction and tinkering with it, you are going to be running up the meter. Because every time you change your mind, your web design agency will have to go back and rejig an element of your website or re-communicate plans to the development team. All of which takes time – and time is money!
Everybody loves saving money and ensuring they get value for money so being decisive with your plans for your website will help you to achieve just that.
Faster Delivery
Secondly, at a time when most businesses have an online presence, delaying the launch of your website could give your competitors the opportunity to nip in and snag some of your potential customers before you’ve joined the party. Therefore the speed with which you can launch could be crucial.
So ask yourself this: is it worth agonising over the typeface you’re going to use, wasting hours trying to choose the most perfect logo, or stressing over the special effects while a client with a potentially huge contract goes straight to your main competitor? I’m guessing not.
Your website doesn’t have to be completely perfect when it’s launched. Sometimes just getting something up there is enough – something that tells your visitors who you are, what you do, how you can help them, and how they can contact you. Then you can build on that over the following weeks and even months while you’re building up your client base and taking orders.
Case Study: Go-Ahead
We recently produced a website for Go-Ahead that is a perfect example of the benefits of snappy decision-making when it comes to the design of your website.
Go-Ahead is one of the largest transport companies in the UK, and the biggest tendered bus operator in London. They were eyeing expansion into the Singapore market, which was launching its own tendering service using a model based largely upon London’s. But before jumping in feet first, they wanted to get an idea of what Singapore’s bus users thought of the current service to give them an understanding of the market and show them where improvements could be made.
They wanted a website which would act as a basis for a customer consultation. However they had a limited budget at their disposal, and a limited window to gather the information.
Thanks to their extreme decisiveness and the trust they placed in our abilities, we were able to put together a simple website that served their needs in a single afternoon. They understood that the website would require tweaking afterwards, but speed was of the essence and they needed the first version online as soon as possible.
So if you don’t want to squander precious time, energy and other resources by prolonging a decision where the outcome is likely to be the same – or even better – by making a quick call, being decisive with your choices and making a clear, confident decision will keep you ahead of the competition, save you money and ensure your website is up and running quickly.
As usual, we’d love to hear your thoughts – what benefits have you received by making snappy decisions? How has being decisive helped your business? Tell us below…