So What? #12 - If your team is scared to touch it, it was built wrong

I’ve been in a lot of rooms with a lot of non-technical people over the years.

Charity comms officers. Small business owners. Volunteers who somehow became the person responsible for the website. Office managers who agreed to “just keep an eye on it” and now lie awake at night worried they’ll accidentally delete the whole thing.

And almost without fail, the first thing they say is some version of:

“I’m terrified of breaking it.”

That sentence tells me everything I need to know. Not about them. About whoever built their website.

Fear is not a normal or acceptable relationship to have with your own website.

Your website is a business tool. Imagine being scared to answer your own phone, or terrified to open your own front door in case you broke the hinges. Sounds daft when I put it like that, doesn’t it?

But it happens constantly. And it happens because websites get built for the person building them, not for the person who has to live with them afterwards.

I’ve seen:

• Websites handed over with no training whatsoever. Just a login and a wave goodbye.

• Backends so over-engineered that finding the right page to edit requires a treasure map and a prayer.

• Plugins stacked on plugins stacked on plugins, all of which need updating, none of which anyone explained.

• Custom-coded solutions where the only person who can change the phone number is the developer who built it and now charges £150 an hour to do so.

Every single one of those is a build failure. Not a user failure.

If your team can’t confidently make basic updates to your website, something has gone wrong. And it went wrong long before they ever logged in.

I work with non-technical teams a lot. Training sessions, strategy workshops, handovers. And the pattern is so consistent it’s almost funny.

Except it isn’t, because these are real people and real organisations who are paying for a website that is effectively being held hostage by its own complexity.

Recently, I was working with a community organisation on their website strategy. Brilliant team. Clear mission. Genuinely passionate about what they do. And an absolutely solid understanding of their audience and what they needed to communicate.

But the website? Nobody had touched it in over a year. Not because they didn’t have things to say. Because they were scared.

We spent time going through not just the how of updating their site, but the why behind every decision. Why this page needs this information. Why their homepage has one job. Why their navigation should have five options and not fifteen.

When people understand the why, the fear largely disappears. Because they’re not just poking buttons and hoping. They’re making informed decisions with confidence.

That’s what good website training does. And it’s what a good website build sets up from day one.

If you or your team are scared to touch your website, here’s a quick sense-check:

• Can you find and edit a basic page in under two minutes?

• Do you know what your homepage is actually supposed to do?

• If your phone number changed tomorrow, could you update it yourself today?

• Does anyone on your team know what to do if something looks wrong?

If the answer to most of those is no, that’s not a skills problem. That’s a handover problem. Possibly a build problem. Almost certainly a training problem.

And all of those are fixable. You just need someone to actually give a damn about what happens after launch.

A website that nobody updates is worse than no website at all. It signals to every potential client, funder, or customer who lands on it that nobody’s home. And Google isn’t a fan either!

The fix isn’t always a rebuild. Sometimes it’s a proper training session. Sometimes it’s simplifying what’s already there. Sometimes it’s just sitting down with the team and going through the why behind every section so it stops feeling like a mysterious black box and starts feeling like something they own.

Because they should own it. It’s their website.

If your team is scared to touch yours, let’s talk. We’ll figure out whether it needs a rebuild, a simplification, or just someone to finally explain what the bloody thing is actually for.

Web Goddess works with small and micro businesses and smaller charities who want a website their whole team can use with confidence. Training, strategy and straight-talking included as standard.