Availability Is King

I was organising a work event the other day whereby I needed to canvass opinion amongst our 100 or so customers about which evening would be the best for a few beers, pool and pizza.

I decided to use this much talked about tool called Doodle.   Effectively, you set up a “poll”, send out the link to your invitees, and then then they follow the link and select which days they can make.  Most popular day wins.  Deadly simple…

..except when it’s not available.

I’d emailed our 100 clients and instantly got a flood of emails back saying the link didn’t work.  It turns out Doodle was only down for about 10 minutes.  But that was enough to make look like a right tosser.  And enough for me never to use Doodle for anything important again.

Today’s lesson for your website : Availability is King.