Websites are so complicated…

I’ve been building websites for many moons now. I remember Y2K…

Oh, crap, did I just show my age?

Seriously though, after you build so many websites, and after the web is now long out of its infancy, people’s attitudes about websites can still surprise me. I still find myself sweet-talking prospects into why they need to ditch their WIX, GoDaddy Builder or museum quality sites and put on their big boy pants. And it’s not even usually about money. They are just genuinely unaware of what positive effect an improved website would make on their business.

Let”s talk simple stats. The current website gets an average of 60% of it’s visitors from mobile devices. If you are using a “Museum Quality Site” your site is most likely not even responsive, which means 60% of your website visitors are loading your site, and giving themselves arthritis just trying to pinch and squeeze to read your website on their smartphone.

While WIX and GoDaddy do build responsive sites, the user experience and overall aesthetic usually feels incomplete or not completely realized. These are all messages that businesses are sending to their prospective customers.

‘Hey, look at our website. We just believe in doing the minimum to get by. But hey! Our product or service is top notch!”

But websites are so expensive!

I used to work in radio , and we would regularly have small businesses paying thousands of dollars a month for radio advertising. Just to get their name out to people. Now, radio sells customers on their REACH, but in reality, they are relying on an antiquated call to action method.

Their thought process:

1. Customer hears radio ad while driving to work
2. Customer loves what they hear and remembers name and phone number or website of company
3. Customer gets done driving and either:
   1. Calls from their phone (Recalling phone number from memory) OR
   2. Pulls up company website on their smartphone (Recalling web address from memory or Googling) OR
   3. Pulls up company website on their home computer. (Recalling web address from memory or Googling)

This philosophy has a few glaring holes in my opinion. First of all, you are not making it very easy for the customer to contact you when they are ready for your service.

Let’s take a hypothetical: Joe’s A/C Warehouse

Joe’s decided to spend $10000 to advertise from Jan 1 – June 1 on the radio. Joe’s website was built in 2002. He has never really gotten much business from it, so he doesn’t see any value in it.

The problem with the radio advertising is that Joe’s prospective customers are only in the market for a new A/C at very specific times. If they hear Joe’s ads in March, but their A/C doesn’t go out until August, it really isn’t benefiting Joe’s. In fact, once their air conditioner goes out, the first thing they are going to do is…

GTS (Google that sh*t).

So a prospective customer of Joe’s A/C Warehouse is never going to find them, because their website is 12 years old and lives on page 32 of Google.

In the big picture, investing in a website ONCE, and then building it bigger by adding more content and marketing it (which only takes Joe’s time) is a much more powerful marketing tool.