The Science of Compliance
Why an outdated website can become a business risk..
There comes a point after every website launch when the excitement has died down, you’ve stopped checking it every five minutes and everyone gets back to the important business of… well, running the business.
Your website is still there, quietly doing its job in the background.
At least, that’s what you assume it’s doing…
We recently heard from a business that discovered the hard way what happens when nobody is keeping an eye on things. They operate within a regulated sector and information published on their website had become outdated, meaning the site was no longer compliant with the requirements of their governing body.
This was way more than just an embarrassing typo or an old photograph of someone who left the company three years ago. This meant their whole website had to be completely taken down.
Now THAT is a problem.
Suddenly, their website wasn’t working for their business at all – because it wasn’t there. So instead of making regular, planned updates along the way, they were having to deal with a much bigger issue which could have been avoided.
And here’s the really important bit:
There was nothing necessarily wrong with the website when it launched.
The problem was that times had changed.
Compliance isn’t a one-off exercise
Businesses change. Regulations change. Governing bodies change their requirements. Your products and services evolve, people come and go, legislation is updated and the information you were perfectly entitled to publish two years ago may not be what you should be saying today.
Yet your website doesn’t know any of that – unless someone tells it.
This is something we talk about A LOT here at FAT because there’s a dangerous temptation to think of a website as a project you complete. You plan it, build it, launch it, tick that particular box and move on to everything else demanding your attention.
But your website is never really finished.
And, let’s be honest, how often are you REALLY going to sit down and read through every page of your own website to check it’s still accurate?
Exactly 😉
It’s not because you don’t care. It’s because you’re busy running your business and there’s always something more urgent to do. Updating the website gets pushed to next week, then next month, then someone says “when did we last update this?” and everybody suddenly finds something fascinating to look at on the floor…
I cover this in more detail in Chapter 22 “Last Updated…” from my best-selling book, Website Mastery for Business Owners Who Don’t Speak Tech. Buy your copy here.
This is EXACTLY why, many years ago, we evolved our support contracts from passive (we’ll make changes when you ask for them), to fanatically proactive – where we contact you every month to prompt for changes.
We don’t just sit here waiting for the phone to ring when something breaks, because good website support shouldn’t be about swooping in after the disaster – it should be about helping you avoid it in the first place.
That regular contact prompts you to think: has anything changed this month? Do we have new services? Have people joined or left the team? Has your governing body issued new guidance? Are there policies, accreditations, prices, contact details or other information that now need reviewing?
For regulated businesses, naturally that doesn’t mean your web company suddenly becomes your lawyer, compliance officer or industry expert. You still need the appropriate professional advice about what your governing body requires – but someone needs to make sure your WEBSITE is part of that conversation.
Because it’s very easy to forget about something that’s sitting there quietly working away.
Until it isn’t.
Have you read our best-selling book: Website Mastery for Business Owners who Don’t Speak Tech?
Download a free chapter or buy your copy from http://www.websitemasterybook.com