Local Business Websites

I have swung my business both ways in the past ( more than once ) Full custom vs cookie cutter. Right now I have swung back to cookie cutter.

That being said... there are caveats to this. I use themes that I can adjust the daylights out of the physical appearance. to the point without looking at the code you would not know what theme it is ( and even doing that I have renamed the theme, so you still wont know what theme I am using )

The reality is this... the site "design" means nothing. Ugly, pretty, out of the box theme, full on custom, it just does not matter. what matters is how the site is built to fulfill the needs of the client. Building a 4-5 page business card site and handing over the keys to the client and saying "here you go" is pretty much a waste of time and money.

Selling the client the ability to draw traffic to their store with the use of a webpage, and walking them through the process and designing a page that meets the clients needs is a whole other beast. One which you are not going to get for $197. Unfortunately for all the clients out there, the price you pay is not a good gauge to determine the ROI potential of your project. ( you get what you pay for ) MANY charge a lot for nothing because they can.

It is the selling and education process that a "Designer" and a client walk through together that determines the value of the final product. This is the process where the Designer has a better more specific idea of the pain points... and through this communication that a Designer can bring the client past the tipping point on a larger budget as needed.

I think in a lot of cases what happens is you get site builders than can do just that build a site. So they make it "Pretty" to justify the expense. They don't have a clue about the marketing aspects and shuffle the most basic of element off to some back page somewhere.

A Designer that happens to be a marketer is approaching things differently. How to make any and every site convert. How to get a ROI for the client they are working with. How to get people through the door. There are basic methods for doing this, and there are more complex ones. Understanding what your client wants and what they are willing and CAPABLE of doing dictates a lot of this.

I am curious as to what you think customization is? When I speak of "Custom" and I am usually talking about scripting and added function. Changing the appearance to me is not really customizing per se, more like an alteration than customizing. Pants are pants. some may need an inch hemmed, others may need the waist let out a bit, but in the end, they are the same pants.

1. Which do you do? More off the shelf or more heavy customizing?
I have also done both and have gone back to the off the shelf customizing. The more customizing you offer, in my experience, means more work for you the developer. I have been in nightmare projects where the customizations get out of hand. I end up spending extra time figuring out how to get the customizations to work which I don’t bill for. Because of that, I have gone back to the cookie cutter sites and do very little customizations.

2. (Multi part question)What do you see as the essential elements to provide for your clients? How much customization do you do?
(1)I think the essentials for a brick and mortar is a basic website with hours/phone/ about the business/ photos, etc.
I imagine I am a customer for the brick and mortar business. What info do I need about that business to get me in the door. (2)When developing these sites, I stick to maybe 1-2 hours of customizations – not including content/color scheme, etc.

3. Why do you say, if you do, that a basic site is useless for a physician or carpenter or whatever is useless IF all the other marketing pieces are in place?
I think a website is necessary for small business like a physician/carpenter/plumber because there are so many sites that will potentially outrank your client’s site making it difficult to get accurate information about the business. If your client has a website, a simple upsell would be to link all those to the clients website.
Generally speaking, a simple website should still be the focus of all the other marketing piece are in place.

There are a lot of businesses in my community that I don’t visit because I can’t find anything about them online. I know that’s kind of crappy, but it’s 2014, every business should have a website even if they made it at WIX.

I have to say that if you can show a client that ugly and basic bring them more leads, sales, etc. - they could give a rat's patoody about what the site "really" looks like - as long as it's professional. This is real life experience talking - we talk about WHY we configure sites the way we configure them and not colors and palettes. My .02