You can't please chicken farmers

I enjoy various extreme sports and the other day I was driving back from a day downhill mountain biking with my brother.

As we were driving back we spotted a chicken wandering along the main road so decide to do a good deed and put her somewhere safe. We parked in a driveway to a farm, captured the chicken, and put her over the fence in to the adjacent field containing lots of other chickens.

As we got back in to the car the farmer walked down the drive and asked what we were doing. “We found a chicken wandering on the road, so put her back over the fence with the other chickens” we replied.

To our astonishment the farmer said “Well of course it was wandering about, it's a free range chicken”, before turning around and heading back to his farm.

My brother and I were not after a reward, gratitude, or even acknowledgement, we simply wanted to help the stranded chicken, Yet the farmer's reaction had us shocked. Common courtesy seemed to have gone a miss and it made us think that you really can't please everybody.

This is true in business, and we all have customers and suppliers that are harder to please than most, so it follows that the same concept is also true amongst users of your website who have not yet turned into customers.

No website will convert every visitor in to a customer; it may make a business appear too big, too small, too cheap, too expensive, too standard or too cutting-edge.

The job of a website designer will be to listen to a company's individual requirements and establish who their potential customers are. The website designer should then put himself in the shoes of these customers and ensure that the website he is producing is correct for the majority of them.

There will always be a chicken farmer out there who will never be happy, but for every chicken farmer there will be many more satisfied customers that will be a pleasure to work with. It is these customers that a web developer should aim to attract. This can be done with subtle tweaks to the website design and content, and associated online marketing strategies.

If you want to know how to attract decent clients and avoid the chicken farmers, please get in touch with one of our web designers in Salisbury to see how we can help.