Corpus Christi Wins on Phones. Your Theme Did That, Not You.

The best pushback I’ve had all year arrived at eleven at night, from a man in Corpus Christi I’ve never met.

“Every designer who calls me opens with mobile. I have opened my own site on my own phone. It works fine. What is it you people are actually selling?”

No anger in it. Just his name, the name of his shop, and a man who would like a straight answer for once in his life.

He deserves one, because he’s right. About his own site, and about this entire city.

Small business websites are what I look at all day. This year I put 24 cities and every trade I could get a list of through the same audit. 79.3% of the Corpus Christi sites I checked pass Google’s basic mobile checks, a shade over the 78% I get nationally.

So when a designer opens his pitch with mobile, in a city that comes 4 of 24 on that very check, he’s charging a man for something the man already owns.

Nothing else Corpus Christi does lands that high. Not one check on the list.

What that check is asking

It’s a narrow question, and it’s narrow on purpose.

Was the page built to fit whatever screen it landed on, and are the things you’re supposed to press big enough to hit on the first attempt without pinching the screen bigger?

Marine businesses fail that one more often than almost any trade I audit, and nobody pinches twice before going back to the search results.

When a site fails, the phone gets handed a page built for a desk monitor and squashes the whole thing down to fit. The business name arrives about the height of a grain of rice, the menu turns into a smudge, and reading the back half of any sentence means dragging the page sideways with a fingertip while you stand in a parking lot.

Nobody stays for that. Not one. So a pass is worth having, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument with a stranger at eleven at night.

He won’t like this next bit

The businesses in this city didn’t earn that number. Their software did, and I can’t think of a polite way to put it.

Whoever built your site picked a theme, and the theme had already solved the fitting problem years before your logo went anywhere near it. Two or three other checks on my list arrived the same way, bundled into software nobody in this city chose for that reason.

That isn’t an insult, and it isn’t your fault either. Most technical progress reaches a small business exactly that way, quietly, in an update nobody read, attached to a bill nobody questioned.

But it does mean something about the rest of the list. Everything still missing from this city’s websites is missing because it needed a person to decide to do it.

Do you see the problem with a report card where the free marks are the good ones?

The check never asks whether the page turned up

Corpus Christi averages 56 out of 100 on Google’s mobile speed test, against 58 across the country.

A page can be built beautifully for a phone and still keep that phone waiting, because the fitting question and the waiting question are asked by two different tests with nothing to say to each other.

Picture the woman your website is really for. She’s outdoors, it’s bright, she has one bar of signal and a kid in the back seat, and she’s already got two other names in her search results.

How long do you think you get?

I ran my speed test on 1,867 pages here, and I’d bet money that not one of those owners has ever loaded their own homepage anywhere except on wifi, sitting still, on a phone that has been to the site a hundred times before.

And it never asks what the page says

My mobile check has no opinion whatsoever about whether your page answers the question she came with.

She wants three things, usually. Do you do the thing she needs, will you come to where she lives, and can she reach you today.

Most of the sites I open in this city make her hunt for all three. The fonts scale, the buttons space themselves out, the layout behaves itself, and the actual answer is on page four under a heading called Services.

Where does your own homepage answer the second one? I mean the sentence itself, the one that names the parts of town you’ll drive to, and I’d guess you already know whether it exists.

Every website I’ve ever rebuilt for a real gain started with someone writing three sentences that were already in his head, and none of that work has anything to do with what a phone does to a column of text.

Reading your website on a phone is easy now, and that part really is finished. Getting what she came for is still hard, and no template has ever shipped with that in the box.

The part where a page works for the person holding it is all decisions someone has to make on purpose, one at a time.

What the city looks like once you add it up

Corpus Christi lands on 71 out of 100 overall.

Best mark it earns anywhere on the check its software handled, and a middling grade once everything else is counted in. Those two facts belong together. They explain each other.

So what am I selling him? Not mobile-friendly, that much I can promise. I’d be embarrassed to invoice anyone for work a template did in 2019 while everybody was asleep.

A page that answers her, a box she can type into, and a review or two, in that order if the budget is small.

If you’re weighing quotes from people around town, the page I keep for Corpus Christi should be held to the same standard he held that designer to. Ask what you’re being charged for, and ask which parts came free in the box.

And if you’d rather have someone run the whole list against your site instead of arguing about it, my audit form is where that starts.

Do this tonight

Find someone in your house who’s never used your website. Your kid, your brother in law, whoever is on the couch.

Hand them your phone with your homepage open. Ask them one question a customer asks you every single week, whether you work Saturdays, whether you come out as far as Flour Bluff, what it costs to have you look at something.

Then say nothing.

Not a word, not a hint, not a helpful little nudge toward the menu when they start scrolling the wrong way. Watch their thumb and count.

If they get it inside ten seconds, that designer was right and I owe you both an apology.

If they don’t, you now know exactly what I’d have charged you for, and you found it out for free on your own couch. Go on, I dare you.