Taking this a bit further, one has to wonder how different the world might be, if motives for communication, negotiations, business transactions, and personal or political decisions were governed by this simple rule for conduct.  Local, regional and national conflicts would be obsolete, nothing over which to disagree.  If this type of gold standard was universally adopted and put into practice, common interests and mutual benefit would prevail.

What a shame that those who speak or write about such a vision, are accounted naïve or dismissed as dreamers!  Granted, given conflicting interests in the world with few answers on the horizon, holding out for such ideals does seem futile at times.

Still, we can start to make a difference in our own business affairs by example, by adopting that gold standard where everyone wins.

A was for Attitude of excellence – All her best students made this grade
B was Better than average – But you better work a little harder
C stood for Common – Clearly just average, nothing special
D meant Deficient – Definitely not good
F was for Failing – Forget wasting your time in her class

That teacher’s little grading treasures struck a chord with a lot of students, because when she retired she was honored as one of the best teachers the school, in its long history, ever had.  Her main theme, regardless of the subject, was attitude.  She taught us the importance of always bringing what she termed an attitude of excellence to everything we did.   We were drilled on things like punctuality, cleanliness, order and respect for authority.  Oddly enough, years later when I entered the armed forces, these were again the very things we drilled on. Anything less was not acceptable.  Like my first grade teacher, my drill instructor understood these disciplines were essential to preparedness, our mental and physical fitness.

I have to ask myself, what has happened to our schools today that such teaching has disappeared?  How can our next generation be prepared for the challenges they are certain to encounter, without the attitude this kind of teaching instills?

I share this because it seems to me everything we do in life is largely graded or measured by the attitude we bring to the endeavor.  One of life’s formidable challenges is to overcome complacency or mere contentment with getting by. These breed mediocrity,  and must be overcome, if we are to succeed in life or in business.  What’s the remedy?  It’s a shift in attitude, when we decide that anything less than our greatest effort simply isn’t good enough.

If there’s one thing seasoned web designers dislike, it’s rank amateurs representing themselves as professionals, only to give their industry a black eye.  Victims of these masqueraders usually wind up abandoning any plans they may have had for an online marketing strategy, because the experience demonstrated websites do little, if anything, to generate more business.

So before you plant that entrepreneurial stake in the ground and launch your new web design business, you might want to get answers to some questions that run a little deeper than uploading a few cool looking web pages:

Have you developed an approach for learning enough about your clients’ business to create and implement an effective online marketing strategy?

Do you understand the client’s target audience enough to know what resources and practices to apply to the site in order to make it effective?

Have you learned best practices for search engine optimization and content development, so it might have a chance to be found a little sooner than on page twenty of a Google search?

Have you familiarized yourself with some analytical tools for continuous evaluation of your maintenance strategies?

Are you prepared to support your client’s online acceptance of debit and credit cards?

Does your client have a back-end database to be queried for customers or other users of the site?  Oops.

Frankly, these are only a few fundamental questions for which you should find answers long before hanging out that shingle and potentially mucking up the industry with more victims.  Unfortunately, many small business owners don’t know enough about an effective online marketing strategy to properly evaluate a proposal.  That’s not a slam on the owners.  It’s just a fact.  Most are too busy running their businesses to garner enough expertise for recognizing the genuine article.  All the more reason that as a web design guru you should be equipped with knowledge and skills that at a minimum address the aforementioned issues, so you can do a credible job.

Thanks for listening!