A trip to Alton Towers?

No, unfortunately not, it just feels like we’ve been on a complete rollercoaster this week! But we’ve come through it and I’m sat here at some ungodly hour on Friday morning (rain woke me up, then mind starting racing, and then couldn’t sleep!) just reflecting on the events of the last few days.

If I can offer anyone some advice as a result of bitter experience, do not, under any circumstances, decide to make a major strategic change to your business, before a crucial event. Does that sound obvious? Of course it does! Let me explain.

We’d decide to change web designer, and hoped to move our site from our old supplier’s server to Fluid’s server by the first week in January. Which would have been in plenty of time for our first preview evening on Tuesday 17th January. In fact, the plan was that Fluid would even be able to make some minor improvements to the site within that timescale.

Well events just dragged on, and for one reason and another, with lots of emails, alleged blame by/from all parties and general stress, by 3pm on the afternoon of the first preview evening, we still didn’t even have a website to show the attendees, who were due to arrive at 6.30pm! The site had been taken off the old supplier’s servers, and hadn’t yet been built and uploaded onto Fluid’s servers. However, after some great work by Lee at Fluid, by 3.15pm we had our website back, and by 5.30pm we also had the ‘back-end’ content management system available to use, so we could enter a few activities into the database, which were of particular relevance for the town we were presenting in, during the few minutes we had spare before delegates starting arriving.
I can honestly say that was the most stressful day in my whole life. I had a pain like a stitch for about 3 days, and I’m sure it was all related, psychosomatic I think they call it. I can see how the human body can’t possibly cope with stress for long periods of time, because it seems to translate into physical pain aswell.

How had this managed to happen, when we’d tried to plan so meticulously for it? Some things are unfortunately completely out of your control, and you’ve got to allow so much more time than you ever think you will need. I was led to believe the site transfer would have happened very quickly, which in theory it should’ve done. But it wasn’t to be.

I think we made a mistake because when we first realised that things were going to take longer than expected, we should’ve just left the site where it was until after the preview evenings, instead of trying to accomplish too much. Of course, at the time, we didn’t think it was too much, and we thought we were being realistic, but as soon as things started to go wrong, we should’ve stopped moving in that direction, and just held fire for a bit longer. We were so close to not even having a site to show, and that would’ve been disastrous for our public relations. We had a backup plan (hastily made on Tuesday morning!), screen prints on powerpoint, but that would not have been ideal by any stretch of the imagination.

However, now back to the positives.

Fluid are currently looking at the site, firstly to ensure they are completely acquainted with the coding and structure. I’ve provided them with a workplan of my priorities, based on changes I’d like to be made before the site is offered to the beta testers to complete our research questionnaire (we have around 20 willing independent beta testers waiting to review the site), and before we allow various members of the media/press to access it.

However, Fluid may alter the priorities slightly, to allow them to work more efficiently, which makes perfect sense. So by mid next week, we should know where we stand in terms of timescale.

We’ve also had some fantastic feedback/emails, both from a press release I issued about our partnership with Fluid, and from requests for regional managers I mentioned in my last diary. In fact, I’m now considering amending the planned rollout we had, because we’ve uncovered some quality people, and it’d be a shame not to be able to use them. So even if you’re not based in one of the regions I mentioned last time, please get in touch if you’d like to become a regional manager with us, because we may well decide to alter the rollout programme. Thanks to those who have already contacted us, we’ll be in touch again shortly.

So back to the supposed focus of this week’s activities.

The preview evenings have been going well. We had 3 so far, and have another 6 planned over the next 2 weeks. We’ve not had massive groups, but that means they’ve been able to be quite interactive, which has given us a much better indication of how users will think, and we’ve also had some good ideas from the attendees, many of which we’ll try to incorporate into the site pre launch. So as focus groups they have been very useful, plus they have really worked well for promoting the site too.

It’s incredibly nerve-racking. I’m normally so confident, and have such a strong belief in the site. But just prior to the start time I got so nervous. Would anyone show up? What would they think of it? Would they tell us something that we hadn’t realised that would make the site useless, or certainly not as good an idea as we thought it was? Etc etc. Your self-confidence plummets, so you have to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, smile, and wait to see what happens.

On the whole they have been very positive, although we had a real wobble at 6.30pm on Wednesday evening when no-one had arrived. Thankfully that wasn’t the case by 6.40pm. Attendance on that night was certainly down, probably not helped by the fact that Manchester United’s cup replay against Burton Albion was being shown on BBC1 - you just can’t plan for everything!

However that ended up being an excellent night in the end, albeit with a very low attendance, so all was not lost.

Next week brings 3 more preview evenings, and hopefully some progress with the site and a firm timescale for launch. Only 6 weeks to go!

Kirsty