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Brick No86: How to fully understand your core skills
By Matt Weston, Friday 30 July 2004 Please don't hate me for saying this Andreas Duess sent me this note on Friday: " Matt, I just sent you a donation. " However, to do so I had to take a look at the code of your page, as the donate buttons don't seem to be working on either Safari or Firefox for the Mac. " Also, and please don't hate me for saying this, who codes the site? The code is an unholy alliance of CSS, table and Javascript . . . (he gets very tech-y here). " Anyway, I'll step off my soapbox now. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Once we're making more money than we're making now we will donate more. " By the way, if you ever want to publish the bricks as a book, drop me a line. " (That last sentence makes complete sense if you look at Andreas's self-publishing website www.pabd.com) Who codes the site? First, hat off: Andreas was good enough to point out that we had a bug, on certain Mac browsers at least. Luckily we sent a test version of Friday's email about the donations to just a hundred of you, so we fixed the problem before sending out the main email to everyone. Second, who codes the site? Uhm, I do (and I'm not embarrassed to admit it). It's a fair cop, Andreas. I concede, underneath the semi-professional facade, www.businessbricks.co.uk grinds and spits. It works, but the truth is I don't really know my CSS, tables and Javascript from my elbow. Sure, a natty web developer could have made it oh, so pretty. But that misses the point. In this case, I believe that taking the DIY approach was one of the best decisions I've ever taken. And it's a lesson that anyone starting or running an early-stage business ought to take heed of. How to fully understand your core skills Let's get this straight: cost wasn't the reason I took the DIY approach. Fact is, over the last 6 months I've had several offers from web guys offering to waive all or most of their costs, in exchange for a few adverts in business bricks. Nope. The reason I opted to DIY was because I didn't want to make a mistake I've seen many small businesses make. I didn't want to outsource a core skill . . . without fully understanding it first. For us, web development is a core skill. As the business bricks buzz grows, we've got stacks of ideas on how we might grow and develop the services we offer online. I believe you can only fully understand something by first doing it yourself. The last thing I'm recommending is that you all go out there and spend fruitless months building your own websites. But you need to identify those skills that are so core to your business, you can't afford not to understand them completely. Our accounts? Easy, we outsource (to Ian Marlow of HfM) Web development? Understand first, outsource later. Sure, I'm not arrogant enough to think a professional web developer couldn't have done a better job. But at this stage - just 6 months in - it's far more important to us that we can constantly tweak, test and learn, than have a site that just sits pretty. I don't want to have to pick up the phone every time I add a new idea. Now we've got a far better understanding of what can and can't be done, and how long it takes. And we know what works and what doesn't. When the time comes to outsource (and it will), we'll get exactly what we require. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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