Someone searched for this today and landed on FWUC.  It’s a good question.

You should, in general, get a response pretty quickly.  If you’re not, you might try talking to another provider.  Like us.  In fact, call us up and we’ll usually give you a response right then and there.

Just thought you might like to know.

Yesterday, a prospect called to talk about her website. She had questions about search engines, site content and a whole lot more. We talked for about 30 minutes. Part way through the conversation she said “Design? Design is cheap. I’ll call India and they’ll do it for nothing.”

Then I got to ask one of my favorite questions: Why aren’t you calling India right now?

She paused for quite a while and then said, “Because I feel I can trust American companies more.”

IMHO, trust is the most important part of hiring a website maintenance provider. Trust lets you, the customer, describe what you want and turn it over. Trust means that you can talk with your provider freely about budgets and goals. Trust means you can concentrate on your business without having to worry about every little thing.

Trust is, unfortunately, a rare thing today. As a provider, it’s our job to build trust. How does any service provider do that?

First, communicate clearly, often and honestly with the customer about the work. That doesn’t mean always telling them what they want to hear. Sometimes you have to be the one who break the bad news.

Second, give prospects a way to try your services that won’t break the bank. For example, given the reduced rate and the advertising costs, we generally don’t make a profit on our New Customer Special.

Third, never commit to more than you can deliver no matter what the customer says. In fact, promise a little less and then deliver a little more. Your customers will appreciate this.

Building trust is a continuous process. We’re not perfect, but these are the kind of things we try to do every day. Writing them down is just a good way to remind ourselves that they’re important. Being trustworthy is a significant competitive advantage. It’s worth a lot more than saving a couple of bucks on labor by outsourcing to India or some other low wage location.

You may or may not remember Public Enemy, a band from the 80’s.  Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing featured their “Fight the Power.”

I was over at their site today checking lyrics on another song and found their message board.

It’s name?

The Enemy Board.

Perfect.  Very cool.   Not just because it matches their name, but because it makes me pause and think and write a blog about it.

That’s the kind of thing we all need to add to our sites.

“Google Dance” was what we called it-that monthly-ish shuffling of search engine rank based on their every whim. So what I saw this last weekend can only be called the “Google Dance, Dance, Dance.”*

First, some background. I blog and, if you’ve talked to me about your site, you know I think you should, too. One of the things that sparked a blog entry was an error message in the new version of Apple’s iTunes. “iTunes is unable browse album covers on this computer.” It’s a terrible error message. There’s no possible cause and no explanation. So I complained.

And, two days later, my complaint was the number 2 result on Google for that error phrase. So I figured I’d go back, find out what the problem was and fix it. Over the weekend, my various posts when from position 2 to 4 to 6 and then, late Sunday night, to the sweet spot: #1. Hundreds of people are hitting the site. Hopefully the page is useful. No, I’m not making any money off of these visitors. Not yet, anyway.

I found three things about this process really interesting.