Hubert's garden
Hubert's new apartment is a hit! Centrally located, quiet and best of all: with a large garden! He feels really at home there and he wants to show it. The garden is set to become a little paradise, and the neighbors will be green with envy at all the flowers and greenery. His garden will definitely be the most beautiful. He hits the garden center. Only the most expensive perennials, a stately hedge of copper beeches, a vegetable patch for his own organic vegetables and, of course, the finest ornamental lawn for sunbathing. For weeks on end, Hubert is only to be seen outside, sweating, digging and plowing in the truest sense of the word... But it's worth it. The new garden has become a paradise. The garden is a dream, the lawn doesn't want it yet, but it'll get better.
Three years later, Hubert is on his way to one of his many business trips abroad and glances briefly over his garden at the gate. Half of the perennials are now just leafless branches that seem to look sadly at Hubert. The vegetable patch has mutated into a wild meadow, which is also interesting, but somehow not intentional. Ground elder, maple and stinging nettle dominate. Well, the harvest of potatoes and peas has always been poor anyway. The ornamental lawn can still be seen in one corner, otherwise the moss has taken over. Hubert hasn't wanted to show off the garden for a long time, but fortunately no one can see it, because the hedge urgently needs to be trimmed. "We should do a lot more," Hubert thinks to himself, "maybe I'll just turn it into a rock garden. It's boring, but I don't have to worry about it..."
Hubert's marketing website
As a gardening enthusiast, this is of course not the case for you. You have your garden under control and you enjoy connecting with nature on a regular basis.
But how many entrepreneurs treat their precious marketing website the way Hubert does? At the beginning, the euphoria is great, everything has to be really good, no expense or effort is spared to use the latest gadgets on the web. Some website projects with only 10 pages take almost a year because this time everything has to be 100% perfect.
After the launch, the website is the showpiece for six months, proudly showing off to partners and colleagues. Gradually, the euphoria turns into everyday life, the web continues to grow, new technologies emerge and the website is suddenly no longer so modern. It is difficult to use on smartphones, videos can no longer be played, the latest news is from 2015. Oh yes, the pictures of the employees also urgently need to be updated, after all, fashion doesn't stand still and recently there was news of new legal requirements. We need to do a lot more, but it's been such a long time since the website maintenance training. So once again, and this time properly ... to be continued...
The scenario at least sounds familiar to us. We therefore found this metaphor quite fitting: the image of plants or the garden as a synonym for an area in which constant growth but also care should take place. The garden is a good example of goal setting, patience and the cycle of yield. Whether ornamental or vegetable garden: both need regular and coordinated care. These are the strategies. It's the same with websites. The strategy, i.e. the implementation of your objectives, is decisive for the type and scope of day-to-day work. After each round of strategy implementation, evaluation and realignment are required. And then you start again. The cycle of digital life. Sounds trivial? That's right. But can you name the three most important goals for your website right off the bat? By when do you want to achieve them? How do you measure success?
Let's play with metaphors a little more 🙂
Every marketing website needs "good soil":
This is the underlying technology: business hosting, a good domain name, an SSL certificate and speed-ups such as content delivery networks and caching systems.
A marketing website needs water and nutrients:
This is the new content and ideas for new content that should be added again and again. Sustainable brand building today is created through content marketing, and your website is a key medium for this.
A marketing website needs pruning and replanting:
This is regular optimization. By evaluating user behaviour on your website, you can find out which pages or content should be prioritized differently. What is clicked on most often? Where do visitors overlook content? This is like pruning your garden to increase the yield or replanting perennials to give them better light conditions or eliminate competition with other perennials.
And the bottom line?
We have drawn you the picture of the garden to make you aware that you should also go through a permanent work process with your website in order to be successful:
Because your website is a powerful and relatively inexpensive marketing tool that 100% belongs to you alone. You can shape and design it according to your ideas to bring in a rich harvest or simply to look good. Growth takes planning, regular work and patience, but the harvest is worth it - because as your website grows, so does your business.
We believe that you don't need a new website every few years, but that your website needs regular and systematic maintenance.
And what does the garden gnome stand for?
The garden gnome stands for the garden gnome.
