A Page, a Form, a Review. Where I’d Start in Corpus Christi.

The wind took a panel out of her back fence some time around three in the morning.

By seven she’s in the yard in flip flops, phone in one hand, photographing the damage for the insurance and already dreading the week ahead of her.

Then she does what everyone in Corpus Christi does. She asks the neighborhood group, gets three names before lunch, and starts tapping.

The first name has a page. A phone number near the top, two photos of work that was clearly done around here, and a short form she fills in while the coffee is still going.

The other two have nothing to tap at all.

Which of the three do you think got the job?

I’ve spent this year auditing small business websites across 24 cities, and Corpus Christi is the one I keep coming back to. I sampled 3,792 businesses here across 45 kinds of work, then audited 2,073 of their websites and put 1,867 of them through a phone speed test.

Then I counted, city by city, how many businesses even list a website. Corpus Christi finished at the very bottom of the 24, at 70.9%.

That number is kinder than it looks, too. A listing that points at nothing more than a Facebook page still counts as having a website the way I scored it, and so does a domain that didn’t load on the day I knocked.

So the number of businesses here with a working website of their own is smaller than the figure I just quoted, and I would rather tell you that now than let you find it out later.

So say your money is small and it has to go somewhere first. Where would you put it?

I’d spend it in this order, and the last item on my list usually annoys someone.

1) A page. Any page at all.

Not a rebuild. Not a brand, not a strategy, not a logo you argue about for six weeks.

One page with your name on it, what you do, which parts of town you’ll drive to, a phone number big enough for a thumb, and two photographs of your own work rather than a stock photo of a van that belongs to a stranger in another country.

That page beats both of the empty names in the group chat. It beats them at seven in the morning while you’re still asleep, which is when a surprising amount of this gets decided.

It will almost certainly work on a phone too, because this city wins that check on the theme rather than on anything its owners decided.

A first website isn’t competing with the beautiful websites you’ve been comparing yourself to for years. It’s competing with an absence, and an absence is the easiest opponent you will ever be handed.

Are you waiting until you’ve got time to do it properly? So is everyone. Properly has been three months away since 2019.

The owners here who are doing well put something up before it was ready, then fixed it on slow afternoons.

If you’ve never bought one before and you want to see how I handle it, my start page is where that begins.

2) A way in that isn’t the phone

Second dollar goes on the homepage form.

23.9% of the sites I opened in this city have one, against 28% nationally, and that’s the bottom of the 24 again.

When I run that check I only look at the front page. On the ones that fail I scroll the whole way down to the footer and find an address, a phone number, a Facebook icon, and nowhere on the screen to leave a message.

Plenty of people won’t call you. Not can’t be bothered. Won’t, the way a woman on a shop floor with a supervisor nearby won’t, or a dad with a baby finally asleep on his shoulder won’t.

Would you rather that person typed you four lines at eleven at night, or moved quietly on to the next name on the list?

The good news is that this is the cheapest thing on the entire page to add, because every builder made in the last decade ships with a form sitting in the menu waiting for someone to drag it onto the homepage.

3) Go and ask for the review

The third one isn’t really money. It’s the sentence you say at the end of a job, and most owners in this city have never once said it out loud.

When did you last ask a happy customer, to her face, to go and leave you a review?

84.2% of the businesses I sampled here hold at least one Google review, where 88% do nationally, 20 of 24 once I lined the cities up.

Stars are what she reads before she ever reaches your page. They arrive first, they cost you nothing but the asking, and they don’t need a designer, a login or a meeting with anybody.

Ask while the customer is standing there happy with the work, because the version of that conversation you have by email on Thursday afternoon almost never gets answered. I’ve written up the way I ask for reviews if you want the words.

A few trades belong the other way around. Families judge an assisted living home on its stars long before anyone opens the website, so I’d spend the first dollar on the rating there.

What I’d skip

A blog.

35.3% of the sites here publish one, a shade under the 37% I get nationally, and I wouldn’t spend a first dollar closing that gap.

How many blog posts on a contractor’s website have you actually read this year, counting the ones you landed on by accident while you were hunting for something else entirely?

A blog is a promise you make to yourself on a good week. I’ve watched owners write four posts in a fortnight and then leave the last one sitting on the homepage with a date on it from two summers ago, quietly telling every visitor who lands there that nobody has been home in a while.

There’s a bigger problem with it than that. A blog exists to send people somewhere, so if the page and the form aren’t built yet, where exactly are you sending them?

Write one when you’re bored and the other two are finished. Not before.

Go and check my numbers

You shouldn’t take a stranger’s table at face value, so don’t take mine. Every rate I’ve quoted is sitting in the explorer on that report, and if you set the city box to Corpus Christi and leave the other box alone, the whole place comes up on one card with the number of sites behind each check. Start with the form line, because it’s the number I’d most like to have got wrong.

If you already have a page and you’re not sure which of the three you’re missing, my audit form will go and look. And if you’d rather hand the lot to someone who works this market every week, that’s the page I keep for Corpus Christi.

What actually changes

Nothing dramatic happens the week your page goes up. No flood of work, no phone ringing off the hook, no line at the door on Monday morning.

One thing changes, and it’s small enough that I can promise it without feeling like a salesman.

The next time someone asks a group for a name and three come back, yours is the one with something to tap. She calls the one she can see.

She always did.