One thing that I’ve learned in a decade plus of building websites is that, not matter how much I want them to, clients do not care how a website works.

• DNS records and Nameservers, no clue what this is
• SMTP server so that emails end up in their customers inbox, never heard of it
• SSL certificates to keep their site and customer data secure, might have seen this
• the list goes on…

I care a LOT because I’m responsible for it being online, being fast, and converting users to customers. It used to frustrate me to no end that my clients didn’t want to overcome their ignorance to this.

Then I reframed how I view it by thinking how I view other businesses.

Why should they care?

They shouldn’t.

Are we as expected to know how to build a car in order to have one and maintain it? No, we hire someone that knows how to and trust them to do it right.

Learning how and why the internet, and websites, work functionally isn’t knowledge that will help them get to their next customer, nor support their current customers.

They just need it to work.

They are building their business around something else completely. The website is just a necessary part of (and in my opinion the most important part) their marketing plan. They need it just like they might need a delivery vehicle, a payment merchant, a store front, etc.

That’s us!

We can use that knowledge to provide a solution for their need (the website).

That can look like the following:

• building and providing your own hosting solution
• consulting and recommending specific content management solutions
• custom web development vs using existing tools

Quickly creating the best solution for my clients is why I’ve studied and learned how the internet works. It allows me to map together different opportunities for their unique set of problems getting a website online.

It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive to be valuable, it just needs to work.