Maintain your website or it'll seize up on you
How to crash and burn an expensive online store application without really trying
Visit any efficient manufacturing plant or assembly line and you'll see expensive plant machinery and equipment producing the products that earn bottom line profit. In some establishments, that machinery has been kept running for over 100 years!
Your website is an expensive piece of equipment
An online store is very much a sophisticated machine, usually custom-built, and painstakingly constructed of thousands of lines of programming code, HTML and style sheets with a sturdy database backbone. All of this sits on a secure server foundation that provides access to your products or services 24 hours of every day. Creating this specialized piece of equipment probably cost a lot of time and money.
As a Web store owner, you depend on your website for every dime of revenue that is generated online. It's an automated order taking, customer creating, product selling, money making computer apparatus par excellence. Without this machine, you got nada online. It stops; your Web business stops.
It doesn't clatter like a machine maybe it's just a parking spot for a vision statement
Your online store doesn't rattle, hum or vibrate. There are no sparks, no splashes of incandescent material and no odor of grease, oil or burning rubber. You can't get your hand caught in it. You don't need a hard hat, eye protection or noise abatement to watch it at work on your computer monitor. In fact, it doesn't ACT like a machine at all. And that folks is precisely the problem.
See, business owners tend to completely ignore the health and well-being of their online business power plant. It's true. After all, what's to worry about? To non-techies, this website thingy floats out there all pristine-like in some sort of timeless cyber womb. I'll bet some crew built your store 5 years ago and not a single darn person has looked under the hood since. Right? Come on. Admit it!
Oh sure. You've updated your contact page. You've even added some products and changed the prices. (You feed in the raw material and out pops the money.) But, there's been absolutely no maintenance done. No one is keeping you up-to-date. I'm talking about overhauling the core software development framework. I'm referring to your site's compliance with web standards and accessibility issues. Perhaps most importantly, I'm suggesting your consider just how safe and secure your web store is from hackers and thieves intent on destroying your Web machine.
The 'information superhighway' is littered with poorly-maintained wrecks
See with a website, everything seems perfect till it crashes. There's no rust to mar the presentation. The Home Page isn't dented. Well, maybe the text has somehow become skewed or an image doesn't resolve anymore. But, who notices that?
Yet, like an motor running low on oil, one day it'll finally seize up. How's that? Well for instance, was your online store created a few years back using ColdFusion application technology? Uh oh: You may want to prepare for a massive database failure called "SQL Injection." Never heard of it, huh?
I can tell you about more than a few calls I've received from anguished online entrepreneurs who, to their everlasting regret, were under the impression that their eCommerce site was a perpetual motion system that never needs attention. Whoops, C-r-a-s-h! One poor woman from New York sobbed in tears as she related that her whole enterprise had collapsed in just days as her site was ruthlessly hacked. A business man from Atlanta was stunned to find his website totally unusable for the same reason. A profitable online store based in New Jersey was horror-struck when its 10-year-old technology was hacked and destroyed over one weekend. And, B-u-r-n! Customer lists gone. Databases useless and unrecoverable. Websites shut down. Every one of them was suddenly and completely at a standstill.
Worst of all, they all had to come up with many thousands of dollars to replace their online machine, or decide to go permanently out of business. Very sad.
Yep, website maintenance makes sense, but there's a major problem
Now we finally get to the heart of the matter: Money.
You, of course, know perfectly well that every business that operates machines must maintain their equipment. It doesn't matter whether that machinery is a pizza oven at your local take-out or a robotic assembly system at a Ford's Chicago plant. In fact, the same thing goes for our cars, home furnace and lawnmowers. But, all that maintenance is in the budget. I mean, you know ahead of time - when you buy the damn thing, it's going to cost you to maintain it.
But, a website? Who the hell plans to maintain a website? Not only that, but the whole concept of actually paying some Web developer money to perform essential maintenance is - way too uncool to contemplate. The fact that some geeks actually charged real money to build it in the first place was over the top. Now they want money to "maintain" it? "Whadda they gotta do anyway?" "How hard is it to fiddle with something so simple anyway?" "If I need maintenance, I'll have that nephew of mine do it. Can't be that hard..."
And that folks is precisely the problem
Ah yes. It's that old familiar problem. Professional websites cost. They cost to build and then you do need to maintain them. Still, quite a few well-educated business people don't give site maintenance a second thought or a spare dime. That includes people who should know better like information technology managers. Many of the very same managers who so prudently invest time and capital in the upkeep of their physical plant totally ignore their online business application. Because it's just a website.
So, now that you know your website is a critically important machine vital to the success of your business, please think about taking care of it. Or, get ready to spend many unbudgeted thousands to completely replace it.
