If you are a business in the modern age then you should have a website. Even the shoe repair man in the 100 square foot shop needs a website, even if it is just a single page. There are a lot of problems that may arise on the internet, and for a business it is a lot worse. A business also has competitors that are trying to trip them up, they the fans of their competitors tripping them up, and worst of the worst, they have disgruntled customers trying to trip them up.
The threat of the disgruntled customer
Just so you know–the disgruntled customer has the potential to deal more damage to your company than all of your competitors combined. A customer may be anybody, from a teen who fancies himself as a cyber terrorist, to the middle aged hacker and the elderly SEO expert. Most of the big online sensations were the result of just one person taking revenge, such as the syringes in Pepsi bottle rumors, or Gerber baby food being tainted with glass.
1 – Not having anything to update your website with
This is a problem for all business sites because the search engines insist that you keep updating your site in order to prove that it is being maintained. But, so many of your pages are stationary. So many of them cannot be updated with anything new for at least half a year.
For example, you may have added a staff list to your “About Us” page, but if you do not take on or lose any staff for months, then what are you going to update the page about? And why would you dedicate staff hours (thereby money) to such a pointless and non-ROI task?
2 – Keeping your website on the first page of Google
This is a permanent problem for businesses and the amount of money you throw at the problem will often have to be in the millions if you want to make sure you stay at the top all year around. The process is like trying to race up an ice slope with no shoes on.
3 – Technical issues due to security or server problems
Server problems are usually to blame, but sometimes your updates create bugs that damage the website. There are times when your reliance on third party companies is your undoing, such as when a card processor or card checking process (the hated Verisign) goes offline and your customers cannot make purchases.
4 – Not being able to fulfill the up-and-down demands placed on you
Your website may become popular overnight as a viral image of your product being used by a celebrity makes people want to buy your product. The orders start coming in quickly and soon you are overwhelmed. But, the real problems do not start until the customers start to email the website asking why their product is not there yet, even though they only ordered it 30 hours ago.
And just as quickly as the sales rush starts, it ends, and you discover that you have dropped several places on the search engine results because your page loading times have increased and you have not updated your site in a month.
5 – Suddenly becoming unpopular without being able to see why
The Internet is fun because your entire company may begin to be hated by the online community and you may never know why. It could start with a big affiliate advert campaign from your competitors that is only running on gambling sites so you cannot see it. It may be an employee who has started making racist remarks on his Facebook page. Or it may be that your adverts online now appear next to adverts that are unsuitable for your customer and you have started to feel the affect via association.
Can a company feel the effects via association? Of course they can, imagine if you run a Christian love card website and your affiliate adverts run on a site exposing pedophiles. Or, let’s say you sell your Christian love cards on adverts that are on a sharing site, but the advert next to yours is for Viagra or penis extensions. Imagine what would happen if adverts for Harley Davidson were placed next to adverts for My Little Pony.
