If you’re a website owner, you’ve made the transition from being a consumer of content and services to being a provider of content and services.
You’ve entered a new world, made a transition toward a new paradigm.
When you were simply a consumer of content or a buyer of goods online, you noticed all the things that were wrong with websites and complained when things didn’t work as expected.
Now, you own one of those websites and are responsible for making sure your site functions and produces the best experience possible.
Yes – you. Not your designer, developer, graphic artist, marketer, copy writer or photographer. You.
One of the common mistakes new website owners make is to assume that someone else is responsible for your website. All those others work for you, but at the end of the day, you’re the one who must take responsibility for your website. And with that responsibility comes the revelation of what is actually involved in making websites function.
You discover the complexity of the systems that keep your website going – the literally hundreds of things that can affect the performance of your site – many of which are out of your control.
You see the many parts that must work together, the multiple technologies involved in assuring the flow of data across the interwebs to the ever-evolving array of devices that will view your site. And you realise it’s a miracle things work as well as they do in the chaotic, ever changing world of the web.
So, no, you can’t sit back and relax hoping that because yesterday things were working, all is well today.
Expect that things will go wrong, because they are, constantly.
Assume nothing, test everything – daily.