Small Business, You Probably Don’t Need a Website
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
As a web professional I was brainwashed into the idea that every business needed a website. For a while that stuck, until I began to realise that most businesses get no return on investment. And, at the same time, most web developers were adamant that their products and services didn’t require a return on investment. Which is madness. In business you pay for something that makes you money and you employ people to make you richer… you don’t buy and employ on the basis of brotherly-fucking-love.
The key phrase when you’re looking to get something done for your business on the World Wide Web is web solution. That means a web solution to your current business problem – marketing, e-commerce, data collection, something that only the web can achieve. If your prospective web developer can’t give you measurable indications of what success and failure look like in that investment then walk away.
Seriously, most small businesses can put a compass onto a map and define their universe. Why, for example, would a tradesman in this small Tasmanian town care if somebody in California accidentally opened his/her web page? Bah. And that’s the trouble, web developers are too busy selling web sites to even consider solving a real and pressing business problem using web technologies. Most developers wouldn’t know a business problem with a web solution if it hit them between the eyes – they sell something else. Internet beach towels.
