Tinkering on websites has been a thing for me since the late ‘90s. The first site I made was an Angelfire powered, unsanctioned site for the local ski hill. (Corel draw, java applets, and embedded weather gifs, oh my!) Over the years I’ve continued to tinker, creating new sites for myself, and friends. Learning new things, testing new technology, and attempting to keep up with shifting trends, it’s all part of the game. At the end of the day, It’s fun, right?
As it turns out… the answer for most small business owners is an unequivocal “no”. Fun is not the first word they’d use to use to describe building and maintaining a website.
Our design team recently completed an in-depth research study with small business owners, revealing a number of noteworthy takeaways.
Small business owners resent the mundane tasks that take them away from the work they enjoy.
To put it bluntly, people don’t go into business so they can build a super-sweet website. In their minds, a website is a commodity. It’s a small piece of their operation that more often than not commands a disproportionately large slice of their extremely limited time.
Those facts sting a little when the output of your day job is supposed to empower super-sweet website creation. It forces a revaluation of your entire approach and begs the question… “What is a super-sweet website, anyways?”
I don’t profess to hold all the answers, however the research study lights the path ahead: Small business owners are not website focused. They require an approach that recognizes their entire business and the context which surrounds it.
Automattic Design 
Comments
Angelfire? Wow, you go back.
>people don’t go into business so they can build a super-sweet website.
Technology folks do, though. That’s why technology-based product design stays stuck in its own bubble. Thus, inclusive design is about stepping way past our own bubble. Thanks for stepping out of the bubble, David.