She Posted Every Day. Her Winston-Salem Bakery’s Site Never Said So.

I get paid to notice things on other people’s websites. It took a Winston-Salem baker, pointing twice, before I noticed mine.

The footer at the bottom of my own site went the best part of a year with no link on it to the account I post on every single week. So you know exactly what sort of expert you’ve got here.

The baker who did the pointing opens her shop six mornings a week, on the far side of town from me. Call her Dana, and take it from me that she’s a lot better at her job than I am at mine.

She hired me to make her website faster. That was the brief, the brief was wrong, and I didn’t know it yet either.

What I found when I looked

Her Instagram had a photo from that morning on it. Buns going into the case, steam still on the glass, twenty comments underneath it before lunch.

Her website had a photo of a different counter in a different light, and a line down at the bottom of the page that said 2019.

Nothing on the site pointed at the account. Nothing on the account pointed at the site.

She was running two businesses, and neither one of them knew the other one existed.

Which one do you suppose a stranger meets first? A woman hears the name from a neighbor, types it into her phone, lands on the website and reads a page that could plausibly belong to a shop that shut during the pandemic.

The good stuff was two taps away and there was no sign it existed.

My audit has a check for this and it’s the dullest one I run. It comes back yes when a page sends a customer off to a profile she can sit and scroll, and no when it doesn’t.

Dana’s came back no. Dana posts more in a week than I manage in a month.

What would yours come back as, if I ran your address through it tonight?

So I went and checked the rest of the town

I went through the rest of the town that night, because I was sure she was the odd one out and I wanted to be able to tell her so.

She wasn’t. Only 61.8% of the Winston-Salem sites I audited link out to a profile at all, dead last of the twenty four cities I opened.

The country manages 66%, and the work involved is one line in a footer, which is the part that makes a last place finish sting a bit. Las Vegas isn’t much better, and a city built entirely on being looked at forgot to point at its own profiles too.

Don’t take my word for any of it, because I didn’t take my own. The explorer at the foot of my report will do the whole thing in front of you: set the city box to Winston-Salem, leave the other box alone, and it prints every check beside the number of sites sitting behind it, which is how I worked out that Dana’s empty footer was a local habit rather than a private mistake.

And this isn’t a town full of junk websites, either. Winston-Salem sits on 72 out of 100 overall, a fair middle of the pack, so what I’m describing is a town full of decent websites that forgot to mention where else you can find them. The same town clears Google’s phone checks better than any city I sampled, and I’ve ranked the excuses I get once it does.

What we changed

Four things, and none of them ate an afternoon.

• Links in the footer and up in the header, pointing at the two accounts she actually uses.

• The dead Twitter link came out. She’d walked away from it in 2016 and the bio still had her old opening hours in it.

• A link going back the other way, from the profile to the website, because she had only ever sent traffic in one direction.

• Her last three posts pulled onto the homepage automatically, so the site stops looking like 2019 without her lifting a finger.

Then I tapped every one of them on my own phone, twice, because a link that goes to a page nobody runs any more is the same problem wearing a nicer coat.

The trip back matters as much as the trip out. Nonprofits point at their profiles better than any sector I audit, and plenty of those profiles still don’t point home.

Did I make the site faster as well? A bit. Nobody has mentioned it since.

What happened after

Nothing dramatic, because nothing dramatic ever happens.

About two weeks later a woman walked in holding her phone with the pastry case photo on the screen, and asked whether that thing was still around.

It was. Dana sold her two of them.

How many of those had she missed over the years, people who watched the pictures for months and never once made the trip across town? Neither of us has a number for that, and neither of us ever will.

Her own line about it was better than anything I’d have written for her: people had been finding the pictures and finding the shop, just never on the same trip.

Her phone didn’t start ringing off the hook. What changed is that the two halves of her business stopped being strangers to one another.

Would that show up in her books? I honestly don’t know, and anybody who tells you they can put a dollar figure on a footer link is selling you something.

Why a whole city ends up here

Because the footer isn’t anybody’s job.

Your website got built once, by a person who is no longer in your life. Your Instagram gets fed on a Sunday night by you, on the couch, half watching something else.

Those two never meet. There is no meeting where they could.

Someone has to own the site once the builder has gone, which is most of what looking after a website actually involves.

The software won’t rescue you on this one either, because no template ever built has known which accounts you keep and which one you abandoned during an office move.

I only found the bottom of my own site because a client had to say it twice, and I doubt you’ve looked at yours any more recently. Could you tell me right now, without opening it, which profiles it points at?

If you’d rather someone else opened the thing and told you which checks come back no, that’s what my audit form is for, and I lead with the worst one every time. I work on sites around here most weeks, though this particular repair is a twenty minute job you can finish before the coffee goes cold.

Who this one isn’t for

One last thing, because I’d hate the wrong person to act on it.

If you’ve got no accounts anywhere and no plans to start any, this post wasn’t written for you. A link to an empty room is worse than no link at all, and I’d rather you spent the hour making your opening hours easy to find.

It wasn’t written for the guy who set up a page in 2014, posted four times and never went back, either. Take the link off. Nobody wants to meet your business through a Christmas message about a truck you sold years ago.

It was written for the Danas. The ones doing the whole job twice, once for the people who already follow them and once for the strangers who never find out any of it happened.

And if your footer already points at the places you actually post, this post wasn’t for you at all. You’re one of the yes answers, which is rarer around here than it ought to be, so go and enjoy your evening.