There is an interesting guest post by Patrick McKenzie on the Fog Creek blog about web marketing. Patrick is some kind of SEO and web marketing legend, so the post is highly recommended to all IT entrepreneurs. Besides the practical advice he wrote, one thing really struck me. Patrick summarized it in one single mind-blowing sentence:
The website is a shipping software product of the company.
It’s incredibly obvious… once someone tells you.
Every day we take measures to better monitor how Amanuens works, detect errors and performance problems. Recently we even completely automated production deployments (way cool BTW: with just a mouse click, a new version of Amanuens gets deployed in production). Yet, our website is some kind of second-class citizen. It’s updated every once in a while and we review its performance randomly, when we feel like it.
Considering the website a real product, a real piece of work that is key to the company is an important shift in mental processes and I believe it’s key for bringing it from mere existence to full life.