The  Compass

— Michael Raymond

If you are a small business owner, chances are you have a website that you paid several thousand dollars or more to have built. You followed your webdesigner's advice about how it should look and how it should function. They are, or were, the expert in that field, after all, and you, as a small business owner had far too many other matters of importance requiring your attention; extremely important things like actually running your business.

Maybe your traditional business has grown, but your web business has languished and you feel that your website could generate more traffic, and thus, more revenue for your business. So, how do you achieve that?

Content is king, and queen, and duke and lord—all the social networking sites bear unfailing witness to this fact. Good, specific content will keep your visitors coming back and will help draw their friends as well. If your site is the guru, the penultimate source of all things related to your business, your visitors will know it and they will become some of your best marketers.

— Michael Raymond

Website software has a short shelf life. Because of this, your website can stop working overnight for no apparent reason.

First and foremost, the software that runs the web server where your site is hosted is continuously being updated. At least it should be.

Server software updates are designed to protect your site, your business and customer data, and the network of your hosting company. Those same updates can, on occasion, cause your site to stop working.

Every few years, new versions of most scripting languages are released. New features are added, old bugs—undocumented features in the programmer's lingo—are attended to and the potential to break something is greatly enhanced.

Either of these scenarios can be time consuming to track down and you will most likely be charged for the time spent in doing so. This does not fall into the category of "paying for somebody to learn" the software. Tracking down issues with errors related to software upgrades requires someone already familiar with that language, and the expertise to know not only the solution when they find it, but how and where to implement it.

Sometimes, you really should reinvent the wheel.

[You can read the full article here].