Meet Our Worst Client
By Kyle McCabe | February 4, 2010
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"The cobbler's children have no shoes."
We’re entering 2010 with a new website, but also a fresh perspective and a new appreciation for the position our clients are in when embarking upon web development projects.
As an agency that offers web development as a core service, we’ve been painfully conscious of the need to update our website for a few years now. It took us a good long while to devote enough attention to getting our own work done, for the obvious reason of being extremely busy with client work. As Robert once put it, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”
Of course finding the time was only part of it. It’s often said “you are your own worst critic,” but we never thought we’d also be our own worst client. Turns out we are.
The Curse of Knowledge
We’ve built websites from research to release, from the ground up, and been very successful at it. Dozens of times. Yet for some inexplicable reason, all of our knowledge about marketing and web strategy, design and usability became completely useless when we started on our own website project. We may as well have been school children trying to reach Mars.
I’ve pondered this at length: how and why does this happen? It didn’t take long to realized we’re not unique in this – it happens with many of our clients as well. But it was rather surprising to experience it first-hand after being on the outside for all other projects.
What we experienced was the overwhelming scope of a web project that involves something so personal you can’t separate the emotional from the pragmatic; the technical from the preferential. This subject matter was so internalized – we take so much of it for granted – that it was immensely difficult to pull it out and put it down on “paper” in a way that made any sense to others. If you’ve ever read Made to Stick, you’ll recognize this as the “Curse of Knowledge,” as the Heath brothers coined it.
But this experience also underscores the value we offer our clients, not only in expertise or great service, but also through caring enough about your business to understand the emotional element, yet remaining objective enough to weigh the practical and external concerns. It’s much easier for an outside agency to keep a project on focus without the “curse” of detailed and ultimately distracting knowledge of the subject matter we found in ourselves during the project.
In other words, if not for the fact we are an advertising and marketing agency, I would love to have hired such an agency to help us with our website. After all, the surgeon doesn’t operate on himself.
Need a Hand?
So here we are in 2010, with a fresh look and a fresh outlook. What about you? Thinking of building your first website or upgrading the one you have? Feeling overwhelmed or apprehensive? We’ve been there, and we can help.
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Photo courtesy of alanlpriest
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