First lesson: Remember if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
2nd lesson: Never pay in full for services you have not seen, do not understand or cannot touch because they are in cyber space.
3rd lesson: “Red Flags never change their color.” (Sorry couldn’t resist quoting me, from my newly released soon to be Oprah’s favorite book, From Cover Girl to Cookie Queen)
My website has been the hardest part of my entrepreneurial journey so far. No offensive to those of you who speak computer or are natural born techie geniuses. As for me and my 50 plus year old brain…web design and all that goes with it makes my Hellish Junior year learning French in look easy!
I was told my website is the most important part of my business. It represents who I am, who my company is and where were going. The business card of the 21st century; Gorilla Marketing and Branding. I get it!
So I hired the “dream team” and have been having nightmares ever since!
They looked so good on paper and spoke such beautiful computer, such as search engines, computer analysis, social media, vendor management, digital marketing, increase SEO and strategic communications. Yes, yes, I need all that! Sign me up!
What was I thinking? I never was good at long distance relationships besides I’m monogamous! Overnight, I was in relationship with someone in India 10,000 miles away, another person in San Francisco and a yuppie designer from South Carolina plus the two sales people who signed me up.
My job was to send them everything about me, my book and my vision for my company. I sent press releases, photos, product information, more photos, cookie pictures, logos and design ideas. I wrote copy, quotes and then more copy for the site and emailed it to my “team” so they could work their magic. Enduring the torture as I watched my web site, my vision unfold with misspellings, weird fonts, different colors and even parts of my story and mission statements had been changed without my permission. I didn’t hire a ghost writer I hired web designers! Everyone involved was in a different time zone and I was never more frustrated.
You don’t need the details of the tedious, tiring hours I put in correcting their work, sending duplicate emails, repeating my goals and visions as I tried to communicate by phone and by email to my team of five. Too many “techies” in my kitchen and all of them speaking a different language in a different time zone, and none of it understood by me. (Thank goodness for my 20 something daughters and boyfriend, who speak this language fluently.)
After more than a month of this craziness, my gift of the spirit i.e. patience was gone. Enough was enough!
My dream team started dropping out and stopped contacting me as frequently. They didn’t speak my language and I have never learned their language… INCOMPETENCY and I wasn’t about to learn!
At my insistence I was reassigned a new designer who comes to my house and actually wants to develop my Lori’s Legendary site and vision, not his. Together we are getting there, but what a frustrating, time consuming lesson to learn.
Just another hurdle and lesson to be learned, but the silver lining is I have a better understanding of great web design. I now know just enough to be dangerous.
Like Zig Ziglar says, Keep your eyes on the goal. ”Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You’re the only one who can do it permanently.”
Tomorrow is a meeting with brokers from Costco and Sam’s Club! So it looks like I’m skipping the workout clothes and donning my hair net to bake fresh cookies.
God only knows where Lori’s Legendary is headed.
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