Ignoring the Obvious

Sometimes the most obvious answer is the one that we don’t see, even if it’s in front of us.

Last Friday I made a complete renovation of my website. I changed the look and I decided to move my blog to the main page. Yes my home page is now my blog page.

In the past, I had a subscription form in my home page, but I thought that it will give much more value to my readers if I had great free information in the main page, and just moved the subscription form to the right column.

So I did.

Now, just by entering your name and email (and hopefully some comments about your main challenge as owner/manager) you will receive 20 free videos with the top questions and answers about restaurant marketing, my 36 Restaurant Marketing Strategies E-Book summary and a subscription to my exclusive monthly newsletter, full of useful marketing information.

Pretty good deal uh?

Well it was, and that’s why I was getting very nice subscription numbers every day… until I moved the subscription form to the right side. Then… nothing happened. Not a single subscriber for a week.

First I thought, it may be the colors (I used a pale grey background in the form). Perhaps people don’t notice the form. So I changed the background color to a nice pale yellow. Still nothing.

This is weird, I though, so I went ahead and added a nice burgundy frame around. Now they will see it for sure!

Still nothing. No one single subscriber.

Sometimes the simplest explanations are the most obvious ones, but our minds are set in our own ways and we don’t see them. It took a comment from my wife (the smartest of the two) when she asked: “Have you tested again the form? Perhaps when you were formatting the subscription form, you messed up the code and people can’t subscribe”.

“I don’t think so.” I answered confident… However, it totally made sense what she was saying so this morning, before leaving the house, I did a test. I tried to subscribe myself, and sure enough the form wasn’t working. You could enter the information, but when you clicked the button “Submit”… nothing happened. :-(

Of course, I felt like an idiot. Rule number one when you are messing up with your site and HTML code is to TEST and make sure that everything is working, and yet, I didn’t do it!

So I went ahead and fixed it (a stupid missing end command was the responsible). Now it is working but I am wondering how many of you tried to subscribe and got frustrated with an irresponsive Submit button.

I sincerely apologize. I’ve you had tried and didn’t work for you, please try again. Now it’s working (Yes, I’ve tested it :-)

I guess that the learning from this experience is, if you have a problem try first the most logical solution before wasting time trying to come up with something else.

Thanks for reading, I feel much better now,
Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.



www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

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