The Point.1888 website 7.0

Yes that’s right – there’s been 6 versions before this one (generally shite ones that I have created). 

Your website is your window to the world so ideally you want an inspirational view.

It looks so cheap, quick & easy (just watch the Go Daddy / web123 TV ads). 

It’s not. 

Finally though, I am so proud to have a website that accurately shares our vision and ambition. For those of you who just can’t wait – please mosey over to www.thepoint1888.com to check it out.

Massive thankyou to Sarah Crimes and Experium who have delivered a site that I absolutely adore. It also got me reflecting on how far we’ve come in the last 5 years and how much (or little) I have learned about web. It’s a strange one – having a good website is absolutely vital to demonstrate that you are a serious company but actually getting a good website takes skill, time & money (none of which you have) especially when you start from a position of no team, no clients, no content and no money.

As with all the painful start up journeys you learn your lessons by running head first into them.

Website 1.0

When you start a company, you google best website builders, read reviews, and check how easy it is to self-teach yourself a new skill – it’s a lovely thing building your first website. You may have the time to play around with slide shows and pictures but soon the patience wears out, you realise you’re not a web developer, and website 1.0 generally ends up being a bit shite. But it's a start.

Website 1.0 can normally survive you a few months but hopefully as you start to actually do some things, it will need to be updated and updated quickly. Over versions 2,3,4 we continued with square space and its frustratingly challenging modular boxes that never really did what we wanted them to do. As a founder you get used to wearing multiple hats but if you’re serious and ambitious you really need to prioritise your website at a time when everything seems like a priority.  

Website 5.0 was the first one I didn’t completely hate. We looked professional, we finally had some content and stories to tell but then Wix launched a fancy pants TV campaign and seemed to be getting all of the plaudits. 

So we switched. 

We shouldn’t have switched. 

Learning a new system and trying to implement this wasn’t probably the best idea – plus then running two systems and trying to transition all in house? It all ended up rather messy. I certainly wouldn’t recommend moving your host server without some professional help, but these are all part of the wonderful journey of setting up a business.

When we finally got serious and had some money to invest, we moved to wordpress which I’m told is the no 1 hosting service today (it’s a fickle & competitive market). Website 6.0 (last weeks one) was actually quite good. We had good content, some fancy bits and pieces to keep visitors interested but compared to what we have launched today? Very average and very slow. 

Probably the major learning was that the basic website host servers are only designed to allow a few 100 hits before they massively sloooooooowwwww doooooooown. One thing that really gets my goat is slow websites and we definitely learned the slow way – our old server can’t cope with the traffic so it’s slooooooow. It's all just growing pains - the more you grow, the more hits you have, the more money you need to spend to cope with more traffic.

Anyay, The Point.1888 Website 7.0 is here. All singing and all dancing. We have a new host server which can cope with the incoming traffic, creative consistency (finally) and something that can share the mission & tell the story of The Point.1888 so far. 

So hover & click away people.