Deciding Whether to Build a Site at All

The question behind the question

Everybody says a business needs a website. That advice is usually given by people who build them, which does not make it wrong, and does mean it deserves a moment's thought.

The useful version is narrower. A website does specific jobs. If your business needs those jobs done, it earns its cost. If it does not, you have bought a thing that sits there.

Three jobs cover most of it: being found by somebody who does not already know you, answering questions before you have to, and giving somebody enough confidence to make contact.

When it clearly earns its place

• People search before they choose. If somebody with your problem opens a search rather than asking a friend, absence costs you.
• You answer the same five questions constantly. Hours, area, price range, whether you do that particular thing, how soon.
• The decision involves money or risk. People check before spending, and finding nothing is itself information.
• You want work beyond your current network. Referrals have a ceiling set by how many people know you.
• You sell something people compare. Being absent from the comparison means losing it by default.

The first is the strongest signal. Search for what you do, from your own town, and look at what comes up. If the results are full of businesses like yours, customers are looking there.

When the honest answer is not yet

Being specific, because this advice is rarely given.

You are fully booked from referrals. A trade with six months of work booked and no capacity does not have a visibility problem. Marketing a business that cannot take the work creates a queue of disappointed callers.

You sell to a handful of buyers who all know you. A subcontractor working for four general contractors is in a relationship business. A site helps for credibility and will not find you work.

You are testing whether the business works at all. Spending on a website before you know what you sell, to whom, at what price, means building around assumptions you are about to change.

Your customers genuinely do not look online. Rarer than assumed and not zero. Worth checking rather than concluding.

What a listing does instead

The middle option nobody mentions.

A Google My Business listing is free, takes an afternoon, and does a substantial share of what a small brochure site does. It carries your name, address, hours, phone number, photographs, and reviews. It appears in local results and on the map.

For a business whose customers search by category and location, that listing may be doing more work than a website would.

What it cannot do: explain a service in your own words, hold your prices, take an enquiry in your own form, or exist independently of a company that could change its rules.

Which is the honest framing. A listing is rented ground with a low rent. It is a reasonable place to start and a poor place to stay.

What it actually costs to find out

The arithmetic that settles most of these conversations.

Take the cost of a modest site, built properly, over three years. Divide by thirty-six. That is the monthly figure.

Then ask how many additional jobs a year it would take to cover that. For a trade with a job value in the hundreds, the answer is usually two or three. For a business with a job value in the thousands, it is one.

If one extra job a year covers it, the decision is not really about cost. It is about whether the site will produce that job, which is a question about whether your customers search.

If it would take twenty additional jobs, you have either a very low job value or a very expensive quote, and both are worth examining.

The cost of building it too early

Worth naming because it is real.

A site built before you know your business describes a business you are about to stop being. The services change, the pricing changes, the market you thought you served turns out to be a different one.

Rewriting it a year later costs money and time you spent once already.

There is also an opportunity cost. Money spent on a site that produces nothing is money not spent on a van, a tool, or stock that would have.

None of that is an argument against having one. It is an argument for having one when it will be used.

A test that takes an hour

1. Search for your service and your town, from a phone, not logged in.
2. Count how many results are businesses like yours.
3. Look at what those sites actually contain. If they are thin, the bar is low.
4. Ask your last ten customers how they found you. This is the single most useful hour in this whole exercise.
5. Count how many asked a question you answer constantly.
6. Decide whether you have capacity for more work.

If most of your last ten came from referral and you are at capacity, you have your answer for now. If several found you by searching, or tried to and could not, you have a different one.

A worked example

A two-van landscaping business in a suburb, doing maintenance contracts and occasional installs.

Maintenance work comes almost entirely from referral and from being seen on a street. Nobody searches for a lawn maintenance contract; they ask a neighbour or stop the van. For that half of the business, a website changes very little.

Installs are different. Somebody planning a patio or a retaining wall does search, does compare, and does want to see photographs of finished work before phoning anybody. Those jobs are worth several thousand each.

So the honest answer for that business is not whether to build a site. It is that the site only needs to serve the install side, which means a gallery, a description of the process, a rough price band, and a way to make contact.

That is four pages, not twelve. And the measure of whether it worked is install enquiries, not total traffic.

The same reasoning applies to most mixed businesses. Work out which part of your revenue involves somebody searching, and build for that part only.

Starting smaller than you were quoted

The option between nothing and a full build.

One page. Who you are, what you do, where you work, what it roughly costs, and how to reach you. Built properly, on your own domain, so it can grow.

That answers the questions a customer actually has, costs a fraction of a full site, and can be expanded when you know what else it needs.

The businesses that regret their websites are usually the ones who bought eleven pages when four would have done, then never filled the other seven.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.