You Get What You Pay For

Mary Diamond

Wednesday February 3, 2010

The first thing that I do, as a consumer, when I hear of a new business or entertainment coming to town is check out their website. I'm on Facebook at some point just about every day anyhow, so ideally I just find a link or google the name and get a feel for what I could expect if I decided to go there IRL.

This is where the red lights usually start popping up. If the site has not been linked to on Facebook, it says a lot about the business and the people who run it. I subscribe to the feeds of local businesses, the bar I hang out at, charities I care about, and even Momentum Workshop on Facebook and/or Twitter. Lots of other people do, too. It's absolutely free advertising if you're willing to maintain your own Facebook group or business page, and just costs the labor fee of a decent content manager if you hire someone else to keep up with the social networking resources available to any business owner. I'm about as tech savvy as any person in my age group and I use the internet to gather information on just about all my exploits into the "real" world.

So if one of these businesses that hasn't been linked anywhere catches my interest, I google the name usually, and maybe our city or some relevant tagwords. Corey and Mike have both explained to me that it is important to note here the way search engines work. They tell me that flash animations are poorly indexed by google, whereas clean XHTML and organized keywords will always perform better in google search rankings. A custom site will also be built from the ground up, with your business goals and interests in mind -and indexed to perform better in the searches that bring new customers. Just two weeks ago I tried to find the website for a new restaurant in town and my initial google search didn't display the site on the first or second page -because it's a low-quality .info site, heavy with flash animation and tiled background images.

The homepage is my first impression of most new restaurants in my area. Granted, I know from experience that some of my favorite restaurants have the most low-budget sites because times are tough and they're trying to cut corners. They already have an established clientele, and have been around long enough to become my favorites. My only hope is that these business owners will eventually invest in a better working, better connected site so that I can use it in the future when I'm trying to plan an event or organize a group outing. If a new business owner won't invest in appealing to his online audience, he's neglecting a multitude of potential customers and as one of them I feel as if I've been written off as unimportant.

A quality business site will provide you with a custom interface, designed for ease of updating. You'll be able to add daily specials or update events, post changes to your stock or menu, and even display a live feed of Twitter or Facebook posts on the main page, so viewers can see that this is a business that's in tune with them and what's going on. If I can click through to a home page and see that the chef is Tweeting the specials of the day, I'm confident that I can go to that restaurant and get just what I saw on the feed. You can't buy that kind of exposure, and the cost of a decent website to utilize these options might be more affordable than you think.

There are plenty of template-based web design options out there for business owners, but is this really the time to skimp on your businesses online exposure? A poorly designed cookie cutter site is obvious to most consumers today, and they make your business look low-rent. Cutting corners on the website is like showing up for an employment interview in pajamas -you won't be taken seriously. That's really not the sort of public image any business owner wants to have, is it?