Treefrog Interactive Inc.

Your Website Is Like A Garden

Water it, update it and every so often -- clear it and start from scratch!

The prospect of creating and maintaining a website can be daunting as there are so many technically confusing variables to wade through when building a site.

However, a healthy perspective to keep you on track is to think of your website as a garden. Think of the high-level similarities: both your website and your garden are external items that people will judge you on, both of them require ongoing maintenance and love, and both of them are living, changing organisms which are constantly at the mercy of environmental change.

Personally, I hate gardening. Many years during my childhood as an early entrepreneur, I was tethered in my grandmother’s garden battling the maniacal dandelions and never found the perspective to appreciate the rewards. (I considerably prefer being clean and basking in the light of a laptop). However, there are some good comparisons to be made here.

To save you reading until the end, my key point is this: a website, like a garden, isn’t a one-time cost. It’s a commitment to ongoing maintenance and updates. You need to remove the deadheads, plant some fresh ideas regularly, and keep the weeds at bay. You have to accept that some parts are dying off, and replant or repurpose. You have to give up on things which just won’t grow, and find things which do.

No client, upon arriving at your doorstep, will be impressed by a partially dead flowerbed you have neglected. They will be equally unimpressed with a website that offers outdated information and wilting visuals.

Get yourself a CMS (Content Management System) or a WOS (Website Operating System), and make sure you can do the website weeding yourself. Then make sure you have a professional behind you to take down the dead trees when necessary. Budget accordingly: the more you budget of your own time and for a professional to help, the better your garden will look.

Also, don’t ever plant something you can’t control. Planting ivy always seems like a good idea at the time, but it has a tendency to sprawl and the gardener spends more time hacking it back than enjoying the spoils. Similarly, companies often try to build massive website concepts, then find they haven’t allotted the time and resources needed to maintain it.

If your garden takes more than a Saturday morning to weed, you will never keep up. If you want it to be bigger, make sure you have the neighbour’s kid in tow. If someone hates gardening, keep them out of the garden. If you know someone loves to garden, take advantage of their interest. It’s the same with your website – build a beautiful website that can be realistically and lovingly maintained by the people you already have.

Imagine that you wish to create a new garden. Some might hire their nephew to come over, twirl a shovel for a few hours and stuff Home Depot pots into some rag-tag cut-outs on the lawn. Others hire a landscape architect to pore over the details of how the sun will affect certain types of plants and design terraced walkways and levels of shrubbery, punctuated by the color of flowers.

The better garden is one which has been thought out in advance to take advantage of the terrain. It will cost a lot more up front, but be easier to tend and less prone to ongoing hassle.

A skilled website architect can help you make similar decisions. By helping you determine what you actually need, and more importantly what your clients need, you can have an exceptional website that is tailored to the terrain of your business.

And, of course, depending on how mature the current garden has become, the new site either should contain vestiges of the previous garden. The trees and thriving plants should stay – and the rest should be composted. The assets of your previous website should never be discounted when building the next one.
And how much does a garden cost? The answer: about the same as a website. You can buy a small garden to cower behind your sink for about $ 50. You can also run out into the local forest and pick flowers for free. Or you can spend millions of dollars on a garden which few people visit. Approaching a website like this will rarely result in profit.

Hire a professional to think about the structure of your garden and make sure you have the right gardener to keep it updated.

Whatever you plant on the web needs attention. It might survive on its own for a few seasons, but the more attention you give it, the more attractive it is to future clients, and the more fruit it will bear.