The Corpus Christi Owners Who Didn’t Wait Until It Was Ready

Someone asked you for your website this week.

You said the name out loud, then spelled the part people always get wrong, and then you heard yourself add the other bit. Or just look us up on Facebook, we’re on there.

They nodded, wrote nothing down, then searched your name from a Corpus Christi parking lot four minutes later anyway, because that’s what everybody does now.

Whatever came back on that screen was your website that day, whether you’d built one or not.

I audit small business websites for a living, and this year I ran the same list of checks across 24 cities. When I ranked those cities by who has a website at all, best down to worst, Corpus Christi settled right at the foot of them, at 70.9%. My explorer prints that as 11.6 points under the national average.

A number like that tells you nothing whatsoever about what to do on Monday morning.

So I went at it from the other end. I sampled 3,792 businesses across 45 kinds of work in this city and opened 2,073 of their websites, which is enough of them that the good ones stop looking like luck and start looking like a pattern.

I pulled out the businesses sitting near the top here, the ones clearing check after check while the city around them drops them, and I wrote down what they had in common.

Four habits turned up. Not principles, habits, and I’ve never once put any of the four on an invoice.

Jewelers taught me the same thing from the other direction, where the shops doing best share four habits and not one of them is a design job.

1. They put it up before it was any good

The strong ones almost never started strong, which was the first thing that surprised me. Their first website was four pages and a phone number, built in a weekend by a nephew or bought off a shelf, and it said who they were, what they did, where they’d drive and how to reach them.

Then they added to it. A photo after a job worth photographing. A page for the service that kept coming up on the phone.

None of those first attempts would win anything, and every one of them was collecting customers while the careful people down the road were still choosing a color for a logo nobody would ever comment on.

The ones with nothing at all are almost always waiting on something. For the logo, for the photos, for the quiet week in February that has never once arrived in the history of this city.

I’ve been hearing those reasons long enough to have written down the six that come up most, and waiting for the quiet week is the one I have the most sympathy for.

What are you waiting for? Say it out loud and see whether it survives being said.

I do this work here for money, so my Corpus Christi page is hardly a neutral opinion. But a nephew and a weekend beats waiting, and I’ll say that in writing.

If the weekend is all you’ve got, a page, a form and a review is the order I’d spend it in.

2. One address, and they own it

The van, the invoice template, the card in your wallet, the fridge magnet, two directory listings and a Facebook page all carry a web address.

Among the businesses doing best here those all carry the same address, the business owns the address itself, and it’ll keep working long after the person who set it up has stopped answering email.

Everywhere else I find three versions of a name, one of them dead, one pointing at a page a marketing company built in 2017, and a Facebook profile doing the actual work.

Who owns your web address this morning? Can you answer that without opening a drawer or emailing a man you haven’t spoken to since the pandemic?

That one matters more than anything a designer will show you in a slide deck, because everything else you ever do gets built on top of it.

3. What they update points at what they don’t

61.9% of the sites I audited here link a social profile, where 66% do nationally.

The businesses at the top post to an account two or three times a week, and their website carries the link to it where a thumb can find it. I check for that link on every audit I run, and it’s the one I most often find missing on a site that’s otherwise fine.

Think about what that does for the stranger reading you. A website is a still photograph, and it looks the same whether you’re thriving or you closed in March.

One tap through to a feed with something on it from Tuesday, and she stops wondering. You’re open, you’re busy, someone was there this week. She’d never say any of that out loud, but she felt it and she called you instead of the other name.

The reverse works too, and hardly anyone does it. Is your web address in the profile she looks at first?

4. They look at the thing from the other side

Once a year at the very least, the good ones see their own website the way a stranger sees it.

They open it on a phone that isn’t theirs. They watch a customer try to find something on it and keep their mouth shut. They ask the person on the phone where they found the number, and then they believe the answer instead of arguing with it.

Everyone else looks at their homepage while logged in, on the same laptop, on the same fast connection, where it has looked fine since 2021. When did you last see yours anywhere else?

You can’t see your own website. You know where everything is, you remember why the menu is worded that way, and your eye slides over the part that would stop a stranger cold within about a second and a half.

Nothing on my whole list of checks is harder to spot from the inside than that, and I’ve caught myself doing it with my own pages more than once. If you’d like an outside pair of eyes on yours without a sales call attached, my audit form is there for it.

Who should ignore me

If you already do all four, none of this was aimed at you. Your phone rings, you know it rings, go and enjoy your evening.

Scottsdale sits at the opposite end of that same ranking, and up there owning a website stopped being worth anything by itself, which is where this city is headed too.

Turning work away this month? Then a website is a machine for getting more of a thing you don’t want, and everything above is a hobby with a hosting bill on the end of it.

And if you’d sooner fight me about the number at the top, throw the whole ranking in the bin. The four habits cost a weekend and a decision, and they work exactly the same whether my scoring was fair to this city or not.

I wrote it for the owner who said just look us up on Facebook this week, and heard how it landed on the way out.

You’ve been meaning to fix that for a while now, haven’t you?