I Won’t Build a Pool Company a Website in a Weekend

I won’t build a pool company a website in a weekend.

I’ve been asked plenty of times and offered decent money for it twice, and on both occasions I said no while the owner phoned the next name on his list.

My reason is boring. Everything on a website that can be finished between Friday night and Sunday afternoon is the part the software finishes by itself, and the rest needs decisions out of an owner who is already flat out in July.

I have skin in this, obviously. Read the rest of it with that in mind.

You have three quotes open

One of them is half of what the other two asked for. You’re leaning that way and I’d be leaning that way too, so let’s not pretend otherwise.

The cheap quote is not a con, and I want to say so before I start pulling at it. Most of the people writing them do exactly what they promised, on the day they promised it, and they’re quick because they have built this same website many times over.

What the number at the bottom leaves out is worth knowing before you sign anything. Do you know what it leaves out?

The software is not the argument

The cheap quote will almost certainly build you a WordPress site, and so would I most weeks, so the software isn’t my complaint. I’ve never paid a penny for it, and your pages live inside it.

If one of the three offers you a builder instead, the comparison worth reading turns on who has to keep it going, not on which one draws prettier pages.

43.7% of the pool company sites I audited are running it, a heavier share than the 36.4% I find across every trade I audit.

Your trade didn’t choose that. Your last web guy chose it, and the fellow before him chose it, and the software has been free the whole time either way.

I spent a week trying to make the platform explain the gap between two gaming businesses with the same prices and opposite years, and it wouldn’t.

A weekend buys you a theme, which is the bundle of design files that decides what your pages look like. Add a plugin or two, small programs bolted on to make WordPress do a thing it doesn’t do on its own, and by Sunday evening there is a website with your name across the top.

Everyone in this trade ends up in more or less the same place. So what separates the companies whose phones ring?

What you get free, and it’s more than you’d think

Free software has quietly killed off a whole category of problem that used to cost owners real money, and pretending otherwise would make me a poor witness.

Do you know who chose the name your homepage carries in a search result? Nobody chose it, and I mean that literally.

Every page arrives with a name sitting in the code where you’d never think to look. Search engines print that line as your blue link, and 99.0% of these sites have one because the software wrote it, not because a human being sat down and considered the question.

The same goes for most of the code checks I run. They pass, on nearly every site in this trade, and not one of the owners can tell me why.

One of them doesn’t come free. The handoff off your old unlocked address is the softest number your trade owns, and your regulars are the ones who find it broken.

You didn’t pay extra for any of that. It came in the box, and a weekend build hands over the very same box, neatly, without breaking a sweat.

What nothing in that box will do

Free software will never explain to a stranger why you’re worth more than the van parked one street over.

A woman comparing three pool companies at eleven at night is trying to work out two things: whether you’re still trading, and whether you’ll actually turn up on the day you said. 33.5% of these sites keep a blog of any sort going, under the 37% I get everywhere else, and a copyright date in a footer is a thin way to prove that a business is alive.

Your trade lives on Facebook, too. Album after album of tile work, before-and-afters, a heater swap photographed at seven in the morning by an owner who’s proud of it.

Only 65.0% of these sites link a profile of any kind, which means a good number of you are doing the hard part of that job every week and then skipping the free part entirely.

How many of your customers do you reckon have ever found that album from your website?

None of that has anything to do with the software, which is why a trade sitting at 24 of 47 on my industry table can be full of companies who did everything their web guy asked them to do.

The invoice that never gets written

Look at what those quotes actually put a price on. A build, a handover, a launch, and after that a blank calendar.

Nobody has priced October, when your form quietly stops sending mail and the first person to work it out is a customer who never got an answer.

Nobody has priced February either, when your opening fee changes and the website carries on advertising last year’s number to everyone who reads it.

So find out tonight whether you could change that number yourself, the way I ask law firms to try it on a weeknight.

That work belongs to nobody by default. It gets done because a person was named out loud in a meeting, and naming a person costs money that a weekend price cannot hold.

So ask each quote two questions, and neither of them is about design.

1. Whose job is it to press publish in October? You want a name and a day, not a support address that ends in a ticket number.

2. If the site went live tomorrow and the phone stayed quiet all week, what would they change first? Listen for whether the answer is about your customers or about their software.

The answers take a minute each and they tell you more than three pages of inclusions ever will. What’s the newest sentence on your website, and which year did anybody write it?

What good looks like here

The pool companies I’d point you at aren’t the prettiest ones, and one or two of them are frankly dated.

They’re the ones where a person went back in.

Prices that match this season. A page about winterizing that the owner wrote himself and that reads like him. Photos with the customer’s first name in the sentence underneath them.

I keep a few finished ones up here if you’d like to see the difference between a site that launched and a site that gets looked after.

These days I build mostly for pool and spa companies, and I get beaten on price often enough that it stopped stinging years ago. I’d rather say that out loud now than have you work it out in a meeting.

So take the weekend

No, I won’t build it in one. But you could take the weekend yourself, and there’s no invoice attached to any of it.

Write the page nobody quoted you for. What happens when a pump dies on the Sunday of a long weekend, how quickly you get there, and what a person should expect to pay when you do.

Then send me that page along with the cheapest quote in your pile, and I’ll say which of them I’d bet on. I have a hunch already, and I would love to be beaten by a Sunday afternoon and a keyboard.