I spent this morning at Engage Web, talking about rebuilding this website.
Let me say the awkward part first. The mess on this site is mine. Whatever ends up looking good will be theirs.
The Plumber’s Tap Drips
I run an ecommerce agency. I spend my working life telling merchants how a website should be built, what to fix first, and why the thing they are about to do will cost them money. I can walk into a store’s analytics and find the problem in an afternoon.
And my own site has been held together with whatever time I had left on a Sunday.
Every consultant has a version of this. The builder’s own kitchen is half finished. The accountant files late. It is not laziness. It is that your own work is the only work with no client waiting on it, so it is the only work that can always be moved to next week.
I have moved it to next week for about two years.
Being on the Other Side of the Table
What I noticed this morning is how uncomfortable it is to be the client when you are used to being the agency.
Someone asks you a question about your business and your instinct is to answer it the way you would answer it for a client — with the solution already attached. You want to skip ahead. You want to tell them what you would do.
That is exactly the behaviour that makes a client difficult to work with, and I could hear myself doing it.
The useful discipline was shutting up and letting them ask.
Why Engage Web
They have been going since 2009, working with businesses around Chester and the Northwest.
What I like is that they are properly part of the place rather than an agency that happens to have a postcode there. That matters more than it sounds. An agency embedded in a business community has to live with its reputation locally, in a way that a firm working entirely at arm’s length never does.
I could have built this site myself. That is the point. I could have built it myself for two years and did not.
What Happens Next
A new site is in progress. I will publish the before and the after, including the parts that are embarrassing.
If you are running a business and quietly avoiding your own website, this is your reminder that handing it to someone else is not an admission of failure. It is the only thing that actually moves it.
I was the bottleneck. Not the budget, not the platform, not the time. Me.