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Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites

One of the challenges entrepreneurs face when trying to grow their business is the point at which they begin to acquire helpers. Some use virtual assistants, some use their teenage or college-age children. Like any employment situation (virtual or contractual), the entrepreneur spends time managing the relationship as well as the work.

It’s no different when you’ve hired a web designer to maintain your website for you. It takes time to decide what you want, communicate your decisions, and manage the results. It’s a necessary part of delegating the work, and provided you have good communication, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. I’ll leave you to imagine what it’s like when your web designer is NOT a good communicator. Perhaps you already know….

We’ve discussed how nice it is to have schedule independence from your web designer: that is, you being able to make changes to your site WHEN you want to, even if it’s after hours. Now we’re talking about how much TIME it takes to manage the relationship with your designer, and whether that time investment is appropriate for “the small stuff.”

I was on the board of my speakers association chapter for 3 years, and during that time I was directly involved with maintaining the website. We had a web designer who handled our maintenance for us for a reduced rate, and he was pretty good about handling the changes in a timely manner. But by “handling changes”, I mean we wrote everything out for him, and even formatted the text in Microsoft Word the way we wanted it to look on the site. We sent in a Word doc, and he reproduced the changes in HTML on the website based on the text we had sent him.

It took 2 hours to prepare that Word document, and it probably took him another 90 minutes to 2 hours to format the text in HTML and upload it to the site. So a total of 4 hours went into those web pages every month. If we’d had access to the site ourselves, we could have made the changes directly in HTML (in 2 hours), and had them visible to the public immediately instead of 4-24 hours later.

It was a better use of his time to work on tasks that we weren’t capable of doing, like the original design, or major updates to the look and feel of the site. The kind of work he was performing was simple edits that we were capable of handling. Consequently, our chapter switched to a membership site that better served our needs as an association, and one that we could manage ourselves.

Are you doing the same thing? Are sending your web designer text formatted in Word and then having them do it over again on your site? I can almost promise you that even if you’re exporting your text as HTML out of Microsoft Word, your designer is NOT using it directly. Word produces notoriously bloated HTML, so most designers ignore it or run it through a cleanup filter before posting the text on your website.

Do it right the first time; as an entrepreneur you don’t have TIME to do it OVER again! Learn HTML and CSS, and handle these simple updates yourself! With a combination of how-to videos, demos, website layouts, one-on-one coaching, and the support forum, the “I Can Fix My Website” program has what you need to learn these skills quickly and easily. You’ll save time by handling website and blog updates yourself, and leave your web designer (if you have one) free to concentrate on the big stuff they really enjoy.

Tomorrow: Reason 1 – Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget

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