Same Trade, Opposite Results, Four Montreal Streets Apart
Two Montreal businesses doing identical work, one phone ringing and one quiet. The city averages 70 out of 100 across the sites I checked, and the gap between those two owners explains most of the number.
There’s a man standing in the middle aisle of a Montreal hardware store on a Saturday morning with a broken part in one hand and his phone in the other.
He isn’t buying anything today. He came in hoping to fix it himself, an employee has just told him kindly that he can’t, and now he needs a person who can, ideally before Monday.
So he types four words into his phone, standing right there under the fluorescent lights, and he gets back a list.
Two of the names on that list are businesses I know. They’re four streets apart, they do identical work, both owners have been at it more than a decade, and both websites would look perfectly fine to you.
One of them gets the call. Which one would you put your money on, knowing nothing else about either of them?
The number the whole city sits inside
The overall grade is ten checks weighted and added together, and when I put the cities in order this spring Montreal came up 23 of 24 at 70 out of 100.
An average is a terrible description of any one business, though. Both of these two sit inside that grade, one of them holding it up and the other dragging it down, and nothing about their bank balances explains which is which.
They spent about the same money. They hired similar people. One website got finished and the other one merely got launched.
Would you know which of those two happened to yours?
What the two of them have in common
Quite a lot, actually, and it’s worth saying before I start pulling them apart.
Both sites load with the padlock showing in the address bar, which is now so ordinary that I’d be surprised by the opposite: 94.2% of the sites I opened here do it, matching the 94% I get everywhere else.
Both owners are proud of their site. Both told me a friend or a nephew or an agency did it, and both used the word professional.
And neither of them had opened it on a phone in about a year, which is the part I’d underline if I were you.
Three seconds in a metal building
The man in the aisle is on a data connection inside a building full of steel shelving, and he has the patience of a man holding a broken part.
The first site redraws itself for the width of his hand. The name of the business, what it does, a button that dials. A box he could type into would do the job as well, and the form is the check this city quietly does best.
The second one hands him the full desktop layout, shrunk. He drags the page sideways to reach the end of a sentence, drags it back to start the next one, and gives up somewhere in the second attempt.
Does the page rebuild itself at the size of a hand, or does it hand over the wide version and leave your customer to do the work with his thumb? A mobile check asks that and then stops. Not whether the site is attractive, not whether the photographs are any good, only that.
Everything else about how a page treats a stranger is a separate argument, and a much longer one.
76.3% of the sites I opened in this city pass those checks, against 78% across everything I audited.
Failing one is almost never a design crime. It’s usually an old theme, or one stubborn table someone pasted in years ago and forgot about, and a competent person fixes it in a morning.
Corpus Christi clears this check more often than any city I audit, and the credit belongs to the themes rather than the owners.
When did you last read your own homepage standing up, outdoors, on your own phone?
The picture he searched with
He doesn’t know what the part is called. Nobody knows what the part is called.
So he does what everyone does now and searches with a photograph of it, or he scrolls your gallery hunting for the same shape.
Every picture on a website can carry a short written description saved beside it, called alt text, and it exists so that a machine and a blind visitor both get told what the photograph shows. Leave it blank and your picture is filed under whatever name your camera invented for it, which no customer will ever type.
The average homepage in this city describes 52.1% of its pictures, against 54.9% nationally.
The first business writes them because whoever runs the site treats a photograph as unfinished until it has words attached. The second business has eighty photographs and not one of them is described anywhere.
Both owners took the same pictures on the same kind of phone. Only one of them ever gets found that way.
How many of your own photographs could a stranger turn up without already knowing your name?
So what actually separates the two
Nothing expensive. Getting that across on a sales call is the hardest part of my week.
Interior designers ring me about phones more than any trade I work with, and I keep telling them the phone was never their problem.
The grade I gave this city is a weighted average of ten separate checks, and the recipe is written out on my methodology page if you want to see which of them count for more.
You can also pull up the same card I’ve been reading from all week. Set the city menu in my explorer to Montreal, leave the industry menu where it is, and back comes every rate in this post with the count of sites it was taken from, WordPress on 38.6% of them included.
Read down that card and a pattern shows up. The checks a piece of software performs on your behalf come out fine here, and the checks that need a person to sit down and decide something come out badly.
The first business has a person. Not a full time one, not an expensive one, just someone who goes back in every few weeks and finishes things.
The second business had a launch day, a round of congratulations, and then four years of silence.
When did anyone last go into your website and finish something that was left half done?
The bit that annoys me
Neither owner made a mistake, exactly.
The second one was never told that a website is a thing you maintain rather than a thing you buy, and honestly, most of my industry has an interest in not mentioning it.
He’s the better tradesman of the two, for what it’s worth. His work is superb, his prices are fair, and his customers adore him.
He just loses a man in a hardware store every Saturday morning without ever finding out that it happened.
Does that bother you as much as it bothers me?
Send me the page
I build websites for businesses around Montreal, and a good number of the jobs I take on are someone else’s work that stopped getting attention.
You don’t need me for any of this, though. Everything I’ve described is a couple of afternoons for whoever already looks after your site, and none of it needs a rebuild or a new design or a meeting.
What you probably do need is a straight answer about which of the two businesses in this post is yours.
So send me the address of your homepage and I’ll go through it and tell you what I find. Free, and I’ll lead with the worst thing, because you can read the compliments on your own reviews page.
