Three Houston Quotes, and Not One Mentions the Phone

Every couple of months a Houston client asks me to email over a PDF of their new homepage so they can show their business partner. I say no.

Sounds precious, doesn’t it? It isn’t.

A PDF is a photograph of a website taken at one particular width, and the width is always the generous one, so signing off on it means you’ve approved a picture rather than a page.

So I send a link instead, and I ask both of them to open it on their own phones while I stay quiet on the other end of the call.

Treat what follows as a note written straight at you, sitting there with three website quotes open and your hand hovering over the cheapest one.

Take it. I mean that, and I’ll get to why.

What all three of them will do for you

Whoever you hire, a surprising amount of the work arrives automatically, and I mean without anybody sitting down and deciding to do it.

95.3% of the Houston sites I opened load over a secure connection, against 94% across everything I audited. Nobody chose that. Hosting companies switch it on by default these days, and most owners couldn’t tell you which year theirs happened or who arranged it. Do you know who did yours?

99.0% of them have a page title written, which sounds like a citywide triumph until you learn the software types it for you on the way past.

Budget builders and pricey ones hand over identical automatic parts, because a modern theme delivers the lot before either of them has typed a word. Price barely touches that layer.

So what is actually different between your three quotes?

The check this city is softest on

Not the padlock. Not the page titles.

77.7% of the Houston sites I opened pass Google’s mobile checks, 17 of 24 cities, and nothing else I check here finishes any lower.

It’s under the 78% I found nationally too, which reads like nothing until you know what the check is asking about.

Google looks at your site with a phone rather than a desktop, and the phone copy is the one it stores and ranks you on. A failure there isn’t a comment on your taste in fonts. It’s a mark against the one copy of your business that Google decided to keep.

Then the human half of it. Text you have to pinch open to read. Two buttons close enough together that a thumb lands on the wrong one. A page that slides sideways under your finger while you scroll, so the words keep wandering off the edge of the screen and back again.

When did anyone last check for those on yours?

What a failure looks like in real life

A landscaper handed me his phone across a table at a taco place off Washington, mostly so I would agree with him that his site was fine.

It was handsome. Underneath the big photograph sat a row of four buttons, spaced for a mouse pointer, and every time he went for Request a Quote his thumb opened the gallery instead.

Three tries. Then he laughed and blamed his own hands.

His hands were innocent. Someone had arranged those buttons on a monitor about the width of a kitchen window, and no human being had touched the page on anything narrower since.

A pool company put a customer through the same three tries, and her thumb was never the problem there either.

A failed mobile check is nearly always that, and nothing more sinister. Not a broken website, not a careless builder, just a decision taken at one size and never questioned at any other.

So how would you ever find out? Nobody writes in to say your buttons sat too close together.

Why the quote can’t fix it

Read all three again and hunt for the line about someone picking your site up on a phone eight months after launch.

No quote sitting in your inbox carries that particular line, mine included, because nobody in my industry has worked out how to charge properly for a job that might turn out to be nothing at all.

A website isn’t a fridge. It gets bought once and then used for six years, while the phones underneath it change three times and every one of them is shaped a bit differently.

The original build was fine. The original build is nearly always fine. What nobody sold you was the ten minutes a year where an actual human being picks the thing up and uses it the way a paying customer would.

So the cheapest quote isn’t risky because it’s cheap. It’s risky for the same reason the dear one is, and that’s why I’d rather you spent the money on someone who’ll still answer the phone next spring.

Houston isn’t a bad city for this

A soft column isn’t a catastrophe, and I don’t want to leave you thinking I said it was.

Houston came out at 73 out of 100 when I graded it, which sits in the upper half of everywhere I looked. Pages here load about as quickly as the country’s do, and I had honestly expected worse.

That grade came off 7,099 sampled Houston businesses and 5,109 websites I actually opened, so it isn’t built on a few unlucky examples I picked out.

The phone is where this city finishes lowest, and the phone is where your customer happens to be standing.

Nearly every business in town carries stars by now, so something else has to break the tie, and it is whatever she meets in the ten seconds after she taps through.

Raleigh runs the same trick on people. Perfectly solid websites, right up until you open one on a phone.

Three questions for whoever you hire

Ask the cheapest bidder these before you sign anything. I listen to the pauses more than the answers, and I’d suggest you do too.

1. Who opens this on a real phone before it goes live, and whose phone is it?

2. What happens in a year when a new screen size breaks the layout, and does that land on my bill?

3. Can I have the address of a site you built two years ago, so I can open it myself right now?

The third one is the whole interview, as far as I’m concerned. A builder who’s proud of a two year old site has been back to look at it since, and a builder who hasn’t will change the subject inside four seconds.

Give the job to a teenager first

Before you reply to any of those three, borrow a niece or a nephew and set them a task on your current site.

Ask them out loud for your prices, then time it. Don’t point, don’t explain, don’t take the phone back when it starts going badly, and try very hard not to make a face.

Teenagers are ruthless, and they give up at about the speed your customers give up, which makes one of them worth more to you than anything I could charge for.

Whatever they struggle with is the part I’d be paying a builder to care about, and it is the part your three quotes have all left blank. Call it the half of the job that decides whether a website works at all.

Now tell me I’m wrong

Plenty of Houston owners read something like this and think it belongs to a different kind of business than theirs.

Yours runs on repeat customers, on the guy who gave your number to his brother in law, on a text message rather than a search result. The website is something your accountant makes you keep paying for.

I believe you, and I mean that without any sarcasm at all. I’ve met a roofer with a two month backlog who has never once been found on a phone by a stranger.

Owners saying that same sentence are how most of the Houston websites I rebuild reach me, though, usually the winter after the referrals thinned out.

So argue with me properly. Send the address and your reasoning in the same message, and I’ll audit the thing while I read your case.