Everybody on Your Street in Calgary Already Has a Website

“They all said the same things. So I’m just going to take the cheapest one.”

She wasn’t wrong about the first part. Three Calgary designers had quoted her, I’d read every one of those quotes myself, and they did say the same things, in the same order, in very nearly the same words.

I told her to go ahead. Sometimes that’s the right answer and I’d rather say so than talk someone into spending more out of professional pride.

Then I asked her one question, and it’s the question I’d like to leave with you if you have three quotes sitting open in another tab this morning.

What do you think you’re buying?

You aren’t buying a website

Not in this city you aren’t. 88.7% of the businesses I sampled here already list a website, second of twenty four, where 83% do across the country.

The person who takes the cheapest quote ends up with a website. So does the person who takes the dearest one. So did the shop next door, and the one across from it, years ago.

Having a website stopped being the purchase somewhere around the time you stopped noticing. What you’re paying for now is the distance between your page and the one your customer opens right after yours, and no quote in your inbox has a line for that.

What all three of them will hand over

Every one of her quotes would have produced a working site by the deadline. Pages that load, a phone number near the top, a layout that behaves itself on a phone.

Behaving on a phone is where most quotes stop. Clearing that check and actually being quick on a phone in this city turn out to be two different questions.

39.0% of the sites I audited in this city run WordPress, which is the same software sitting under plenty of sites you admire and plenty you’d wince at.

The software was never the variable. It hands the rushed build and the careful build exactly the same starting kit, and it has never once asked either of them who is going to write the words.

A platform is a set of empty rooms with the power switched on. Whoever moves in decides whether the place is worth visiting, and every quote you are comparing this morning covers the rooms, the keys and the paint before stopping politely at the door of everything that comes afterward.

That’s why the quotes read alike. They’re describing the same delivery, because delivery is the easy part and everybody in my trade knows how to price it.

What none of them mentioned

A client of mine ran for six years with his company name, set in a curly font, as the biggest line on his homepage.

That top line is the H1, the heading a page puts up front to say what it’s about, and a search engine reads it before it gets around to the rest. His said nothing whatsoever about what he sold.

71.3% of the homepages I opened here have one at all, against 73.7% nationally, which is one of the softer spots in this city’s numbers.

For six years he paid for advertising that delivered curious strangers onto a page whose largest sentence was pure decoration, and every one of those strangers had to work out on their own what the business actually did.

Nobody quoted him for that line. Nobody quoted against it either.

Consultants get the identical treatment. Their gap is a wall of reviews nobody will sell them, and I put that whole argument in a letter to one of them.

It’s about twelve words of thinking, it costs nothing, and it never appears on an invoice, so for six years it never got done. How long has yours been up there saying nothing?

The part that needs a person after Friday

36.5% of the sites here publish a blog, where 37% do nationally.

I’m not about to tell you to start a blog. I’m telling you what that figure is really counting, which is the share of businesses in this city where someone, at some point, carried on working after launch day.

Most sites never get that. They get built, they go live, everyone shakes hands, and then the site sits there for four years with the wrong opening hours on it.

Keeping one alive after launch is a short list of dull jobs, and not one of them fits on a delivery schedule.

The cheapest quote is cheap for an honest reason. It’s priced as a delivery, and a delivery finishes on a Friday.

Whoever writes your next homepage has to know what customers actually ask you on the phone, in the words they use when they’re annoyed. That’s an hour of your time at minimum, and I’ve never seen a quote that includes an hour of yours.

Four questions I’d ask before I signed anything

None of these are about money. Money is the least interesting thing on that page.

1. Who writes the words? If the answer is that you can send your content over whenever you’re ready, you’ve just been handed the hardest job in the build and it isn’t on the schedule.

2. What happens in March? A site nobody touches for a year rots quietly, and every quote you have ends at launch.

3. Whose accounts are these? Ask who holds the domain, the hosting and the logins, then watch how quickly the answer comes back.

4. What did you ask me? If nobody on that call asked what you sell or who buys it, they’re quoting for a shape, not for your business.

What I’d actually do in your shoes

Take the cheap one, if the cheap one came from a person who asked you questions.

The questions are the test, not the number at the bottom. An expensive quote from someone who never asked what you sell is worse value than a cheap quote from someone who spent twenty minutes on the phone finding out.

That’s an odd thing to write on the website of a company that sells websites. It’s also the advice she got from me on the phone, she took it, and the site she ended up with is perfectly fine.

If you’d rather skip the whole comparison and hand it to someone in town, that’s my job and I’m easy to find. I’ll also tell you when the site you’ve got doesn’t need replacing, which happens more often than you’d expect.

Send me the page

Whichever quote you sign, do one thing for me when the site goes live.

Paste the address into my audit form and I’ll open it myself, on my own phone, and write back with what I’d change and why.

If the honest answer is nothing, you’ll get that too. It costs you the ninety seconds it takes to send it and it costs me half an hour, which I promise I can spare.

I’ve seen plenty of cheap builds that were perfectly good and a few pricey ones I’d be embarrassed to have made. Yours is the one I’m curious about now, so let me have a look at it.