Nice estate agency website? Avoid cheap black bag syndrome
I had a big celebration in my house yesterday. It was a double little knees up.
Firstly a kindly Nigerian lady called Femi Blessings Oyadele contacted me out of the blue via email offering me a share of $18,000,000 if I gave her my bank account details. How kind is that?
Secondly and more importantly I binned a problem that had been bugging me for months.
What follows is a true story, the name hasn’t been changed to protect the idiot. Me.
Around Christmas time I did a run to the cash and carry. Stocked up on the usual festive fayre but I also bought my missus a top quality bin (No it wasn’t her Christmas present). It was like the Ferrari on kitchen waste disposal units. Stylish, sleek, practical and well engineered, I could well be describing myself.
It cost £60 or so quid. No problem there as you get what you pay for.
I should have remembered that old saying when I bought the bin liners to go in it.
I went cheap. £1 for 50 liners. Very cheap. With hindsight what was I thinking, as my wife pointed out when I got them home, ‘There obviously a load of utter shite at that price’ (she’s from Doncaster).
She was right. Over the last few months I’ve been annoyed, frustrated and depressed at my cheap black bag buy.
They split at the slightest touch, they are so flimsy you can’t carry them from the top and you have to hold them from the bottom like a blooming koala!
I lost count of the number of the times I cursed them and indeed myself for being a penny pincher and paying the price.
It came to a head when a bag totally split last week when I was putting the rubbish out on the front drive in preparation for the bin men. It went all over the shop.
I don’t know whether you’ve seen the Fawlty Towers scene where Basil (John Cleese) smashes the shite out of his broken down car with a branch but my reaction was similar.
I f’d and blinded calling a black bag every name under the sun. It was madness. AND my old neighbour Roy was looking out of his window at my lunacy.
I’d suffered them too long. The time had come.
So I binned the remaining bin bags. Bought some quality ones, which worked out at 20p a pop as opposed to 2p and the problem is now solved.
I see a similar issue every week almost with estate agency websites. A lot of money is spent on the website, a good investment, but then the corners get cut on the site’s content.
Often it’s a price thing. The website cost £XXXX meaning the content was left to someone in your team who likes writing and will do it as part of their day work or the website designers’ company simply to reduce costs.
A lot of web designers offer a content writing service but in my experience their skills lie in the design and functionality and not the writing of winning words. It would be equivalent to expecting Lionel Messi to score four up one end AND be able to mark the opposition’s most dangerous player out of the game.
It really is like me buying that top quality bin then trying to fill it with crap, cheap and nasty bin bags.
The words on your website add personality, authenticity and build rapport with your potential clients when they read it – don’t dismiss that lightly or go for a cheap and often not so cheerful option.
If you feel your website’s copy is in need of some TLC or even screwing up, throwing in a ‘decent’ bin and starting again let me know.
I’ll do a quick and honest review of the site’s content to let you know what I think – no obligation.
Thanks for reading and here’s to your next instruction.
Jerry
PS: I told my neighbour Roy the tale of the black bags but slipped in that my wife bought them – that’s journalistic licence.
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