One Afternoon, No Budget, and a Kelowna Website That’s Already Fine

My own homepage went eighteen months without a contact form on it.

I know. I sell websites in Kelowna for a living.

There was a phone number, and a page called Contact you had to go hunting for, and I told myself that anyone who really wanted me would find it. Enough of them did that I never questioned the arrangement.

Recognize that argument? I made it for eighteen months, to people who were paying me to know better than that.

Then I put a form on the front page and my inbox changed inside two weeks. Not doubled. Changed enough that I quietly stopped defending the old arrangement.

So take the order below from a man who left the cheapest job on his own list undone for a year and a half.

Where this town actually sits

Kelowna lands on 74 out of 100, third of the 24 cities I graded.

Scottsdale is the only city that came out higher. Denver landed level with it, and everything else I audited came in underneath.

3,777 businesses here went into my sample, and 2,951 of them had a website I could open and audit.

Third place doesn’t mean the websites here are good, and I’d rather you didn’t read it that way. It means the plumbing is in better shape here than in most of the places I looked, which is a compliment to a few hosting companies and about four local agencies.

Plumbing is the part a quote covers. Nobody quotes you for the writing, in Montreal or here, so it stays undone in both places.

A grade like that changes the question. Most of the dull work is already done here, so nothing below is a rebuild, and none of it is me talking you into a new website.

Say you’ve got one afternoon and nothing to spend. Where would you point it?

First: a box a stranger can type into

26.4% of homepages here carry a contact form, against 28% across everything I audited.

A contact form is about twenty minutes of work for whoever holds the login to your site, and it sits there so a stranger can start a conversation with you at half past ten at night without having to speak to a human being.

I pulled that rate twice, because it looked low enough to be a mistake of mine, and you can pull it yourself if you like: the explorer near the foot of my report rolls up a whole city when you choose it and leave the other box on all, and it prints the number of sites sitting behind every rate it shows you.

Why first? Because it’s the only item on this page that changes what lands in your inbox this month.

Your customer has four tabs open and a small question. She isn’t phoning a stranger at that hour to ask it. She types it into whoever gave her somewhere to type.

Ask a builder for a form and you’ll usually get one with nine fields on it, because a form somehow looks more professional the longer it gets. Professional isn’t what you’re after here.

Name, email, one big empty box. Every extra question you add to that form costs you people, and the postal code field costs you more of them than you would believe.

Second: ten text messages

89.3% of businesses here hold at least one Google review, and reviews carry as much weight in my grade as any check I run.

This one takes an evening and it has to be you. Not a plugin, not an agency, and please not one of the services offering to write them on your behalf.

Ten messages to ten customers who were happy with you. That’s the entire job, and the awkwardness of asking is the only reason it doesn’t get done.

What do you write in the message? Nothing clever. Tell them you’re trying to get better at this, ask whether they’d mind leaving a couple of lines about the job, and paste the link in so they never have to go looking for it.

Who was the last person who told you to your face that you’d done a good job? Text that one first, tonight, while you still remember the conversation.

Third: point at the feed you already run

66.8% of sites here link out to a social profile, a hair above the 66% I get across my whole sample.

An hour in the footer for whoever holds the login, and then you never think about it again for the life of the website.

Your feed is almost certainly better than your website. It’s newer, there’s more of it, someone touched it this week, and it answers the one question a homepage written in 2021 can’t answer at all.

Every one of those accounts has a link inside it you could copy in about four seconds, and whoever built your site almost certainly left the footer editable for exactly this sort of thing.

So why is it hiding behind a search a customer would have to think of running?

What I’d skip: starting a blog

38.3% of sites here publish a blog, which is more than the 37% I find nationally, and I’d still tell you not to start one this year.

I write one. I’ve written one for years, and a lot of my clients arrived through it.

So why would I talk you out of it? Because wanting to write and feeling you ought to write are two different states, and only one of them survives a busy August.

The other three jobs end. A blog is a standing appointment with yourself, forever, and it’s the only thing on this page that can be done badly enough to hurt you.

Most of the ways a blog goes wrong start with writing one because you feel you ought to.

I know exactly how it goes, because I’ve watched it happen to clients who insisted on it. Three posts in February, one in March, then a photograph of a Christmas tree and complete silence until the following summer.

A page dated eleven months ago tells a stranger something no empty website ever would. It tells her you started something here and then stopped.

Two orthodontic practices published the same article one year, and only one of them got a call out of it.

Start one when you’ve got the time and the appetite for it. Not on the afternoon you’ve set aside to catch up.

Before you go

None of the three needs a designer, which is exactly why I put them in that order.

One more costs nothing either. Typing a line under each photo is the softest number this town posts anywhere in my audit.

If you’d rather hand the whole thing over, I’m here and I rebuild these things for a living, and my audit form will tell you what I’d do to yours before either of us talks about money.

Open your homepage on your phone tonight and count the taps between the top of the page and a box you could type your name into.