You Don’t Need a Website in New Orleans Until You Do

You don’t need a website.

That’s my opening answer on most New Orleans sales calls, and I get about four seconds of relief out of the person before I have to take half of it back.

What I mean is that you don’t need one this month. You need one before a particular day arrives, and nobody has ever managed to get that day into their calendar in advance.

Nobody has ever let me get to the second half of that answer. A call moves along, we end up back on the proposal, and the owner hangs up holding the four second version instead of the useful one.

Where the question comes from

I went looking for how many businesses in each city have a website at all. New Orleans came back 23rd of 24 cities, at 73.0%, out of the 5,091 businesses I sampled here.

So it isn’t a strange question in this city. It’s a normal one, asked by people who have watched their neighbors do perfectly well without one.

Would you buy a thing your whole street seems to be getting along without? I wouldn’t, and I sell the thing.

And not having a site isn’t some private shame. 17% of every business I counted is in exactly the same position, and a good number of them are having a fine week.

I spent a week ranking the reasons owners here give me for skipping it, and only one of the five came out of that ranking intact.

Why my honest answer is usually “not yet”

A business here gets its first hundred customers out of people who already know someone. Your cousin’s neighbor needs a caterer, your name comes up at a table on a Sunday, and no web address is involved anywhere in that chain.

That works. It works better here than in most of the places I’ve counted, and I’m not going to stand in this city and pretend a homepage invented word of mouth.

Plenty of owners here have also decided their real audience lives somewhere else entirely, and they aren’t wrong about that either. 65.8% of the sites I did open here link a social profile, about the same share as everything else I audit, so putting your energy where the people already are is a normal instinct everywhere, not a local eccentricity.

If you’re busy, and the busyness comes from people who already know your name, then a website is not your emergency this quarter. I’ll say that on a call and lose the sale, and I sleep fine.

Two consultants rang me the same month, one turning work away and one who hadn’t heard from a stranger all year, and the website wasn’t what separated them.

The three things that break without one

So what actually goes wrong? Three situations, and honestly they’re the only three I’ve ever watched do real damage.

1) The comparison

Someone types your kind of business and this city into a phone. Three names come back. Two of them can be opened and read, and yours can be telephoned.

She isn’t going to telephone. Not at that hour, not before she knows what you charge, and not when tapping the other two costs her absolutely nothing.

When did you last ring a business to ask a question you could have read the answer to? I can’t remember doing it this year, and I’m older than most of the people deciding about you.

You never hear about that one. There’s no bounced email and no missed call, because she never got as far as wanting anything from you in the first place.

2) The question a listing can’t answer

Your Google listing holds your hours, your phone number, your stars and a handful of photographs. Ask it whether you deliver across the river, whether Tuesday costs less, or whether you do the thing a competitor told her you don’t do, and it has nothing whatever to say.

Those are the questions that settle it. Every one of them costs you a call you never got, and I’ve watched owners lose a month of work to a rumor they could have killed with two sentences on a page they controlled.

What’s the question you answer twice a day, every day, in the same weary tone of voice? That sentence is the entire reason to own a website, and it doesn’t need a designer.

Word of mouth has to land somewhere, and for most people here it lands on that listing first. 81.0% of the businesses I audited in this city hold at least one review, which is under what I get everywhere else, so a fair number of names arrive in front of a stranger with nothing underneath them at all.

3) The morning the account goes quiet

Your Instagram is borrowed. You don’t hold the keys, and the terms you agreed to can be rewritten by people who will never learn your name.

I’ve had two clients lose an account they’d spent six years building. Both eventually got them back. Both spent a month in the meantime with nowhere on earth to send anybody.

Have you got a single address that nobody else can switch off?

What I’d actually do about it

If you’re on the fence, I’d work in this order.

1. Fix the free parts first. Your listing, your hours, your photographs, and asking two happy customers a week for a review.

2. Write down the three questions you answer on the telephone every single day of your life.

3. Then build the smallest possible thing that answers those three questions and lets a stranger reach you without dialing.

That’s not a website project. That’s an afternoon and an address you own, and it’ll outperform something handsome that answers nothing.

Someone has to keep it running after that, and what that involves month to month is far smaller than most sales calls make it sound.

Could you write those three questions down right now without thinking hard? Most owners can do it in under a minute, which tells you the difficult part was never the writing.

Most of what I build in this city is four or five pages, and the owners who arrived wanting twelve have usually talked themselves down to five by the second conversation. When someone asks me what it costs, I send them to the page for that and get out of the way.

Who I didn’t write this for

I didn’t write any of this for the man with a two year waiting list who stopped answering his phone in 2019. If your problem is too much work, a website makes it worse, and I’d honestly rather you kept your money in the bank.

I didn’t write it for the woman whose entire trade is three contractors who have had her number since 2011. She doesn’t need a homepage. She needs one of them to retire slowly and recommend her on the way out.

And I didn’t write it for anyone who already has a site and thinks the job is finished, because having one and having one that answers a stranger are two completely different achievements. One bakery owner here had a quick, tidy site that nobody could get into, and I talked her out of the rebuild she’d been saving for.

So which of those three people are you?

I wrote this for a fourth one. For the owner who has noticed that the customers who used to walk in now arrive holding a phone, already half decided about something before they ever open their mouth.

If that’s you, you already know which way this goes. You just wanted someone honest to say the first part out loud.

And if you’re one of the first three, close the tab with my blessing. I’d rather lose the work than sell you a thing you don’t need this year.