Washington DC Came Third of 24 Cities on Blogging, and I Sorted It Twice

Last week I spent two evenings and most of a Sunday morning working through Washington DC business websites, one browser window after another.

Tea going cold at my elbow. Headphones on, nobody to talk to, a few hundred addresses to get through.

I run the same checks in the same order every time and I don’t skip ahead, even when the first page I open tells me exactly how the rest of the morning is going to go.

Then I put the cities in order, one check at a time, which is how a place stops being a pile of websites and starts looking like somewhere with habits.

When I got to blogging that Sunday, Washington DC came up third of the 24 cities, so I shut the whole thing down, opened it again and ran the count a second time.

Same answer. Let me take you through the checks the way I actually run them.

1. Is there anything to open

The first box isn’t about design at all. Does the business have a website, or is a phone number and a map pin the whole of it?

85.7% of the businesses I sampled in the city list one, which is a good showing and still leaves a chunk of the place invisible to anyone who searches at eleven at night.

I pulled 6,105 businesses across the 47 markets I track inside the city and ended up opening 4,373 of their sites, one after another, in the same browser window.

2. Open it on a phone

Second box. I shrink the window to the width of a hand and see what the page does about it.

Does the writing stay big enough to read? Does a photo or a table run off the right hand edge, so the whole page slides sideways under your thumb?

Almost nobody fails this one badly anymore, because the template did that work years ago and the owner never had to know about it. Try yours while you’re sitting there. Does anything slide sideways?

3. How long before anything shows up

Third box, and the one that ruins my evenings.

I’ll load the homepage the way a phone on a bad connection does, then wait for something readable to turn up on the screen.

DC comes out of that at 57 out of 100, which reads like a dull number until you’re the woman standing at a bus stop with two bars of signal, waiting for a page to make up its mind.

Nobody in the city’s winning anything there, and the fix isn’t a new website, whatever you get told. It’s usually a photograph someone uploaded straight off a camera four years ago, at the size of a poster.

4. The padlock, and where the old address goes

Fourth box. I type the address without the s on the end and watch what happens next.

A site can have its security sorted and still leave the old, unlocked version of itself sitting there answering the door to anyone who finds it. So what I want is the browser moving me across to the safe one by itself, and if it doesn’t, that’s a job for a Tuesday afternoon.

DC handles both of those better than most places I audit, which is what happens when a city full of offices has an IT person somewhere in the building.

5. What the page calls itself

Fifth and sixth boxes go together, and I read them the way a stranger reads a search result.

The page has a name stored in it, and a sentence offered up underneath. Could a stranger tell what you sell from those two lines and nothing else? If she couldn’t, they’re not earning their keep.

Plenty of the ones I opened last week couldn’t manage it. Home, then Welcome, then the business name followed by the town followed by the business name again.

6. The blog

Second to last box, and I nearly stopped running it years ago because the answer was always no. It isn’t always no anymore.

My check isn’t looking for a page called News with one entry about a party in 2019. It wants posts with dates on them that keep arriving, written by a human being who works there.

40.8% of the sites I opened in the city keep one going, and I’d have bet money against that before I ran it.

Nationally that number sits at 37%, and every instinct I have says a city should land under it, because the rest of my checks are work you can pay a stranger to do and a blog post is work you can’t.

Someone else installs your security. Someone else ticks the box for your page name, hands you an invoice and goes home.

But a post is an hour of your own Sunday, and the person who has to write it is you, because nobody else knows why the job on Tuesday went sideways or what you told the customer afterwards.

So a city that keeps publishing is a city where owners are still sitting down to do an unglamorous thing that nobody’s charging them for. That’s why I ran that one twice.

Nobody in Montreal quotes an owner for the writing either, and that city publishes less than anywhere else I audit. The two look related to me.

7. Add it up

The ten checks are weighted, and the methodology page shows exactly how.

Put them together and DC lands on 73 out of 100, a solidly middling result that tells you almost nothing about what’s actually interesting up there.

The interesting part is one check deep, and it’s the check my whole trade ignores.

What the writing actually does for you

A stranger who reads a post about a job like hers has met you before she calls you. She knows how you talk, whether you explain things or talk down to people, and whether you’re the sort of outfit that’ll own up when a job runs long.

Meeting you and finding you again are two different jobs, mind. A woman read a mover’s guide on a Sunday and couldn’t get back to him by Tuesday, because the line that names the page had been left to a machine.

No homepage does that for you. They’re all the same three promises in a different font.

Most people who call me about a website in DC open by asking for a redesign, and a fair number of them would be better served by publishing eight honest posts about the work they did this year. There are ways to make a mess of that, and most of them come from copying a blogger you admire instead of writing your own.

I say so, they go quiet, and then they ask me how much the redesign is anyway.

I took one of those jobs here last winter. The page came out lovely, and the star rating it was supposed to lift never moved a tenth.

Is your site the one keeping that number up, or the one dragging it down? You know the answer before you check, and so do I.

Send me the last one you wrote

If you’ve published anything at all this year, send me the link. Not the whole site, just the one page.

I’ll read it and tell you what I’d do with it, and whether I’d have called you after reading it.

If you’d rather hand over the whole sheet instead, my audit form walks the same order I just walked and emails you what it found.

But start with the post. What was the last thing you put up?