Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Slow down and do things right
I'm still smarting a little from last night's encounter with SiteBuildIt's training manual. I've long preached that you should look for what your audience is looking for when planning a site and offer that instead of building it from the viewpoint of what you want to sell and how you want to sell it.

Then I started planning the website I'm helping my son Joel build with preconceived ideas of what it was going to be about and how he was going to earn money from it. Then as I read through the training manual, I kept finding reminders to slow down, set aside all preconceived ideas, and let the research tell us what would work best. Ouch.

Well, hopefully this old dog can learn some new tricks—especially since he's been telling others about those tricks for years.

I'll be offline again tomorrow night because of my father-in-laws funeral. But I'm leaving Joel with an assignment to come up with enough ideas of themes he'd find interesting to base his site on, so we can start researching the supply and demand for them on Friday (as opposed to committing ourselves to the first idea that came to our heads, like I was previously doing).

It's embarassing to catch yourself doing exactly what you've long told others to avoid. But it shows just how easy it is to fall into that trap. And hey, that's how we grow.
Jeff