Washington DC Sits 18th of 24 on Stars, and a Rebuild Won’t Move It

A new website has never once lifted anybody’s star rating, in Washington DC or anywhere else.

Alright, once. A client’s rating climbed the spring after I rebuilt his site, and it climbed because his wife had started asking every customer for a review on the way out the door, which I had nothing to do with and couldn’t put on an invoice.

The rest of the time I hand back a better page, the owner is delighted with it, and the stars sit exactly where I found them for another eighteen months.

So let me walk you through one page, before and after, because a single homepage explains my job better than any chart I’ve ever drawn.

The page as I found it

It opened with a photograph of a skyline that wasn’t even his city.

Under the skyline sat a slogan in a script font, and under the slogan, four buttons, two of which pointed at pages he’d deleted years earlier and never noticed were gone.

His opening hours were inside a picture. You couldn’t copy them, you couldn’t tap them, and on a phone they arrived at about the size of an ant.

The phone number lived down in the footer, grey text on a grey band, underneath a map that took its own sweet time to load on anything slower than office wifi.

Nowhere on that page could a stranger type him a message.

He’d been running it for eight years and it had never cost him a single customer that he knew about, which is the part every owner holds onto, and I do understand why.

Have you ever gone through the front page of your own site on a borrowed phone, out on the sidewalk where the screen goes pale, with a customer waiting on you? Not to change the opening hours. To read the thing properly.

The page as I handed it back

The new one opens with a line saying what he does and the neighborhood he does it in.

Hours in text, written in the same words he’d use out loud. His own photographs, shot on a Tuesday morning with a borrowed camera, of the real shop and the two real people standing in it.

Near the top, a short form. Three boxes and no puzzle to solve, the clipboard a busy shop leaves on the counter so people can write themselves down instead of standing there being ignored.

Only 26.3% of the homepages I opened in the city have anything like it, a little under the 28% I get nationally, so his old page had plenty of company and the company was wrong.

He called me in March to say people had stopped phoning to ask whether he was open, because they’d read it for themselves and turned up.

That’s a real result, and I’ll happily take credit for that one.

What didn’t move

His rating.

Not a hair. The same two sour reviews from 2019 sat at the top of his profile, and my expensive new homepage sat behind them like a beautifully fitted room with a boarded window at the front of the building.

Anybody searching his name met the stars first, and the page I’d spent three weeks on came second, and only for the people who got past them.

Nobody in my trade sells a fix for that, and I suspect it’s why the 4.5 star average I counted across the city, 18th of the 24 cities, is the softest thing in the whole DC result. Nothing else I check puts the place any lower. The same city finishes third of 24 on blogging, and I sorted that column twice before I trusted it.

It isn’t a shortage of reviews, either. Businesses there hold 147 apiece on average and 86.7% have at least one, which is an awful lot of people already typing things about them.

The stars are getting written. They’re just landing where they land.

So how many people do you think read your rating this month and never reached your website at all? I can’t count that one for you, and neither can anyone else selling you a homepage.

Which of the two does she meet first

Think back to the last time you needed a locksmith at an awkward hour of the evening.

You searched, you got a list of names, and you read the little gold row on each result before you read one word that anybody had written about themselves. Did you open the one at the bottom?

Of course you didn’t. Neither would I, and neither will she.

The website is what happens after she picks you. The rating is most of the reason she picks you at all.

I can rebuild the first in three weeks. The second one takes a season of asking out loud, at the counter, in a text message the next morning while the job is still fresh in her head, and I’ve never found a shortcut through it that lasted.

The half of my report card I can’t reach

My grade walks up to the outside of your building. It reads the sign, tries the door, peers in through the window, and it never once comes inside.

So it can tell you the page loads quickly and the form arrives in an inbox a living person still opens. It has no opinion whatsoever about whether your van turned up on the day you promised it would.

Your customers have an opinion about that, and their opinion is the only part of this whole exercise that gets written by people who owe you absolutely nothing.

Which is exactly what makes it worth more than anything I build, and exactly why I can’t reach it from my desk. It’s also the one line on my report that no designer alive will ever put on a quote. Ask around and see if I’m wrong about that.

I told one owner to sign the cheapest of the three quotes on his desk and spend what he saved getting himself reviewed.

What I’d do with the next four weeks

If your stars are strong and the page is the embarrassment, then call me, because I still rebuild pages like his in DC and I enjoy it more than I probably should.

If it’s the other way around, push the rebuild to the fall and spend a month asking instead. Ask the ones who were happy, on the day they were happy, before the whole thing leaves their head.

The longest review lists I counted anywhere came out of a habit rather than a campaign, and the habits behind them are dull enough to keep up.

Then go and read your two worst reviews properly, the way you’d read them if they’d been left about a competitor down the road. Was either of them fair?

Mine was, the one time it happened to me, and it stung for the best part of a week before I did anything useful about it.

And who was the last customer you actually asked for a review? Not hinted at, and not a sticker by the till. Asked, out loud, by name.

There’s a knack to the asking itself, and it’s a smaller thing than most owners brace for.

Watch what turning up on time for two weeks straight does to a rating. It’s slower than a redesign, it costs nothing, and it lasts a great deal longer.

So the next stranger types your name and gets two things on one screen. A row of stars, and a page you paid a designer to build.

Which one is she reading first?