Why Doesn't Anyone Visit My Website Or the Two Minute Rule

In his worldwide best seller Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen presents the two minute rule: Anything you can do under two minutes, you should do immediately. Don't procrastinate, don't put it in your inbox, just do it.

Therein lies the problem with most websites - they are too darn hard to change, usually, only by several minutes, but in today's fast-paced business environment, that's just too much. Popular CMS software such as Joomla or Drupal can do just about anything you ever wanted them to do (after all that's why you started to use them, right?) but that ability comes with a cost. My personal experience leads me to think that for any given task, a customer will average about 30 minutes to make one change to their website. The reason for this? The software is so powerful, that it's hard to find the right feature.

So when you're thinking about website development, thinking about the 2 minute principle. Your web development studio should be able to provide specific admin components for the exact parts of your website that you need to change frequently. (And, it should be mentioned, your website should change its content at least once a week to maintain its freshness rating in search engines) So then, don't let your web development studio off the hook! Make sure they *complete* their development, and make sure they know this means that the controls *you* need are front and center, no more than two clicks away, and take absolutely minimal effort to find.

One case study, is my primary studio/profile page. Until recently, it suffered from a very old design, but the design wasn't the worst part. The news never got updated, and it was impossible for casual visitors to the site to tell whether or not it was active or not without dropping us a line. Now, however, the entire back end, every blog post, every screen has a slick admin site attached to it. Even the flash animation on the front page automatically updates itself whenever new info about recently completed sites becomes available. It takes less than two minutes to update every single category that needs to be updated, upload new pictures, and put a news blurb on the site's front page. Remember, if you can't say that about your site, you're not updating it often enough, Google is not ranking it high enough, and worst of all, you are probably losing business.

Timothy does work for Vancouver Web Development Studio Palantar.org and specializes in PHP, .NET, Flex, and hard problems.

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