Know Where to Get It Right

With a lot of businesses, there are, depending on your type of business a number of ancillary aspects of your business that you need to get right otherwise people won't take you seriously.

That thought was made clear to me recently when I received a duplicate bill from our accountant recently. It came 4 months after we had already paid the first one and was for a different amount. This, coming from the people we are entrusting not to screw up our accounting, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

On the web, it's easy to put up a professional front even if you're nothing more than someone working out of a basement. Put up a nice website, get some nice-looking business cards and you're in business.

The converse, however, is also true - you can easily destroy your credibility by doing thing that a legit web shop shouldn't be doing.

Your website shouldn't say 'under construction' when a generic picture of a bulldozer. It should be a nice solid example of your work and not require that everyone view it 800x600 on IE6 (No one will think oh wow they've been in business for a while, instead they will just say, wow they look dated).

You also shouldn't use superwebdesign@gmail.com* as your contact email.

If you can't do elements of your core business correctly for yourself, how can your clients count on your being able to do them correctly for them?

Bottom line - even if you're swamped with work, make sure you put your our house in order and do the things that make it look like you actually know what you're doing

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*I'm not picking on anyone in particular, that's not a real email as far as I know.