The Social Links That Prove You’re Still Open in Bismarck

Social icons in a website footer are decoration.

That isn’t fair and I knew it wasn’t while I was typing it, because I’ve just spent a month counting the things and the count talked me most of the way back out of my own opinion.

67.4% of the websites I audited in Bismarck link out to at least one social profile, against 66% across my whole sample. When I put the cities in order on it, Bismarck came out 9 of 24.

No other check in Bismarck finishes higher, though a few sit close enough behind it that I wouldn’t make a fuss about the order.

So the icons are there, and the town puts them there more often than most places do. Whether they’re doing any work is a different question, and it’s the one I went looking for on a single page.

Before

The page belonged to a two-man crew who refinish hardwood floors, second generation, and the work is lovely.

Above the fold there was a logo, a phone number in the top right corner, four menu items, and a wide photo of a living room floor with late afternoon light coming across it at an angle. Whoever took that photo knew exactly what they were doing.

The headline over it said the company name, then the word Flooring.

Underneath came three paragraphs about quality craftsmanship and attention to detail, the sort of sentences you could lift onto any floor company’s website in the country without changing a single word of them.

At the very bottom, five gray circles in a row. Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn.

What my check said, and what it doesn’t say

It’s one stop inside the same run I do for a paying client, in the order I always use, and on my screen the social check comes back as one word. Yes means the page links out to a profile somewhere on it, and no means it doesn’t.

That is the entire test. It doesn’t click. It doesn’t care whether an account has posted since the pandemic, and it never verifies that the handle in the link still belongs to the person who owns the building.

His page got a yes, and it deserved the yes on the terms I set.

Then I clicked all five, which is the part my check has no way of doing.

• Facebook went to a page whose last post was a Christmas message from 2021.
• Instagram went to a login wall, because the handle had changed and the link never did.
• X went to an account with four posts, all from the week it was created.
• Pinterest went to the web designer’s own account, which I found funnier than he did.
• LinkedIn went to a company page with one follower and no logo on it.

Five yeses from a machine, one working link, and that one opened onto a wall.

So: decoration. My opening line, sitting right there in a footer, exactly as smug as I meant it.

The usual defence is that nobody clicks those icons anyway. Indianapolis links them more often than most towns do, and the photo that would earn a click is still in a camera roll behind a screenshot of a parking sign.

Your footer is probably telling a version of the same story, and you’d have no particular reason to suspect it of anything.

How many of yours would survive that walk? You could find out in the next two minutes, and I’d bet you already know which icon you’re nervous about.

What we changed

Five things in an afternoon, and only one of them was design.

Three of the icons came off the page entirely. A link that goes somewhere dead is worse than no link at all, because a customer who clicks it learns something about you that you never intended to tell her, and she learns it in the second before she goes back to the map.

Would you rather a stranger found a dead page with your name across the top of it, or found nothing to click at all?

The two survivors moved. Out of the footer, up beside the phone number, written as words instead of circles: photos of last week’s floors, over on Instagram.

The Instagram address now points at the handle they actually use. I opened it on my phone, off wifi, standing outside, which is the only way I trust a link I’ve fixed.

After

Same photo. Same phone number. Same four menu items, because there was never anything wrong with them.

Under the hero photo there’s now a strip of the three most recent posts from that account, pulled in live, each one carrying its date.

The dates are the part that matters. A stranger scrolling past three floors finished this month learns that the business exists, that it works, and that someone was on a job site in the last two weeks, which is more than the words quality craftsmanship have ever done for anyone.

Wineries have the same job and mostly bury it. The link is there and the proof sits three screens down, which is no help at all to a woman deciding where to go tonight.

And the paragraph about attention to detail got deleted, which it had been asking for since about 2019.

Could a stranger tell from your own homepage that you worked at all this month?

The two lines underneath

While I was in there I looked at the sharing tags, which sit in the code and never appear on the page.

On my screen they print as three lines: a title, a sentence, and the web address of an image. Whatever you put in those lines is what appears in place of your link when it gets pasted somewhere.

His had the title filled in. The other two were blank, so his address arrived wherever it was sent as a naked blue underline, looking like something forwarded around in 2003.

Yours are either filled in or they aren’t, and I’d be amazed if you’d ever seen them.

75.0% of the sites here carry those tags, close enough to the 75.7% I find everywhere else that I can’t stand here and tell you the town is bad at it. His just wasn’t filled in.

Why this city links out and doesn’t write

A social link is a business saying there’s more of us over there, so go and have a look at it.

Which makes the other habit here an odd one to sit beside it. 31.7% of the sites I audited here publish a blog, against 37% across my whole sample.

So the town points outward well and writes very little of its own.

I don’t hate that trade, honestly. A dated photo of a finished floor does more for a floor company on a Tuesday than eight hundred words about the history of hardwood ever will, and it takes about forty seconds to post.

But it only works if the door at the end of the hallway opens. When did you last check that yours does?

Half of what I actually do when I rebuild a site for a business around Bismarck isn’t design work at all. It’s clicking things nobody has clicked in four years and quietly deleting the ones that go nowhere. That’s the dull half of keeping a website alive, and nobody has ever asked me to itemize it.

Send me yours

Open your homepage right now and click every icon on it, including the ones down in the footer you’d forgotten were there.

Where did each one take you? Was anyone home? When you landed, could a stranger tell from the top of that account whether you’re still in business?

If you’d rather I ran it, send me the address and I’ll do the same walk on your page that I did on his, then tell you which of your links is quietly lying about you. It takes me about ten minutes, and I’ll be just as clear about the ones that are fine.

And if all five of yours turn out to be alive and posting, come and tell me that instead. I’ve got a city average to explain, and someone up there is clearly doing the work.