Do You Check Your Work?

Posted On: 2010-04-22

If you're a newcomer to the adult online industry then today's column is for you ... and maybe it's for you if you've been around the industry for quite some time too. And what are we going to talk about today?

Today we're going to talk about finishing the job we started. The 'job' can be anything from a gallery to a free site, an entire multi-page website to a one-page wonder. It can be anything that can make us money as long as we don't cut corners and end up rushing to finish it off because we want to move on to something else.

When we do cut corners and rush to get jobs finished we make mistakes and in this industry mistakes are definitely going to cost someone money ... and usually that someone is you.

Over the last week Steve has been building a multi-paged website for a client. The client has a fairly successful business that involves him in several somewhat related ... but at the same time quite different ... areas and he has a huge website that covers all those areas.

The huge website just isn't working for him. It's poorly designed ... it's severely lacking in a number of areas related to marketing and it's a dog in the search engines. Someone else built this huge site for the client at a cost of many thousands of dollars.

So because the main site is just not working the site owner came to us and asked us to build a totally new site that is focused on just one aspect of his business. Even though it's only focusing on just one aspect of the business it's nothing as simple as a five or six page free site.

To obtain information for the new site Steve was directed back to the huge site and told to take all the information he need from there. That's when we found one of the reasons why the huge site just wasn't working as the site owner had hoped it would.

It had been built by just one guy ... someone who thinks that the answer to every web design problem resides in a content management system. It's obvious that the huge site was almost too big for one person to complete and it also soon became obvious that the guy who built it had tried to cut corners simply to get the job completed.

The client had provided the designer with large amounts of information in the form of word documents and the designer had simply copied and pasted each page of information into the content management system directly from the word document.

He obviously didn't realize that most content management systems can't cope with the code that comes with a straight copy and pastes from a word document. When you try a straight copy and paste you end up with some very strange characters in place of some important punctuation marks. Formatting can also be a problem.

But that wasn't this guy's main mistake. His main mistake was that ... in the rush to get the job done ... he hadn't gone back over every piece of the work he had done. He probably hadn't even opened up most of the pages that the content management system had generated because, if he had, he would have seen the messy formatting and many instances on each page where the code from the word document had totally confused the content management system.

The end result were pages ... very important pages ... that were unreadable in some instances and so poorly set out in others that no one would have waited around long enough to do business with the owner of the site.

Now it seems that we're going to get the job of cleaning up the mess in the main site too and that's good ... we'll make money doing it ... but the owner of the site shouldn't have had to pay twice to get website that worked. The guy who designed the site in the beginning should have gone back over every single page in the site and checked for mistakes before it went live.

The links ... the page layout ... the punctuation ... the spelling ... all those things should have been checked on every single page before the site went live. But they weren't ... instead the designer was in a hurry to get the job finished and the end result was a total mess that was never going to work and produce the results that the site owner wanted.

But I'm sure that you're not like that. I'm sure that you check every link on every gallery you submit and I'm sure you check every page on every free site and one-page wonder you build don't you? And you never rush to get a job done just because you want to move on to something else do you?