Why having a bad website can be a good thing

As you may or may not know, my dad is a property developer. My family lives in a house that they’ve not really done anything to since they moved in about nine years ago. They’ve been mentioning about how they need a new kitchen, that the wallpaper on the stairs needs replacing, that they’d like to replace the floor in the den where the dogs have ruined it, and so on. Anyone seeing their house wouldn’t hire my dad as a property developer (not that he needs hiring because he works on his own properties, but still). The only thing he’s really done was replace the family bathroom – and then only because the pipes needed replacing and everything was literally unusable after the cold weather last year.

It’s not because he’s lazy; he’s the hardest working person I’ve ever met in my life and doing manual labour for up to 17 hours a day, especially when you’re in your 60s, is pretty hardcore by anyone’s standards. The point is, if you’re good at what you do, then you always have something else on that is higher priority than your own turf. If you’re a property developer and your own house looks fantastic, you either aren’t getting any work or you’re spending money (which you should be investing in properties and other resources) on getting people in to do your house.

There are some parallels with web design and development. If you’re looking to hire a designer or developer and they have a website which is under construction, in maintenance mode or gives a poor first impression, you may not even make it beyond the homepage. But it’s not a bad sign on its own. It took me over a year to complete my portfolio/showcase site and make it live because I was so busy and I wanted to get it right. Until then, I emailed samples to clients in individual documents when requested: not the most professional or user-friendly approach, but at the end of the day it’s the work itself that’s important. If I were hiring someone, I’d be basing it on their past work, attitude and response times before their actual website. I’m not saying that the website isn’t important – because it obviously is – but it’s not really a real reflection of how good that person is until you dig deeper and actually read and look at what they’ve done.

It’s the complete package that will often make or break a deal, particularly if the person or company hiring has high standards. If I look at your ‘professional’ Twitter account and see that you do nothing but whine and complain, I’m not going to want to get involved with you. If, on the other hand, I see that you’ve posted links to your projects and other interesting resources and you’ve been having involved/related discussions with other people, I’m going to be impressed. You’d think that much would be obvious, but I’m consistently amazed at how many company/’professional’ accounts I see that are just streams of complaints. Keep your tweets classy, save the bitching for Facebook…assuming that you have good privacy settings of course…

So the moral of the story is – having a perfect website isn’t as important as a lot of people think. Being busy is, more often than not, a better sign.