The Website is Dead!

The website is dead — long live the website…

Does your business need a website? With an increasingly vocal body of opinion heralding the demise of the website, here in rural Pembrokeshire, we face a different question on an almost daily basis: why do I need to be online (let alone need a website) in the first place.

Yes, really. In the 21st Century, the age of mobile, of superfast broadband (even out here on the edge) of lives lived online, there seems to be a very clear section of the business community that struggles with the concept of being online, full stop. As digital marketeers, phrases such as “I don’t need to be online — everyone knows where to find me”. “I get all my business by word of mouth — why do I need a website” “I have enough business — I don’t need/want to grow” are something we hear every day when we’re out and about in the business community. We’re fairly certain that it’s not limited to our corner of South West Wales, either.

So how do we answer this? Obviously, as web designers, we have an interest in persuading those elements of the business community which have so far resisted the lure of the world wide web that joining the digital party is in their best interests. We can bandy statistics around, and argue that more and more of the population have their head down, glued to a smartphone and use Google or Facebook as their ‘word of mouth’. We can agree that this is an approach that may work to a limited extent for extremely local businesses.

The bottom line though, is that we’ve seen the benefits of an online presence even for these small local business. The bookkeepers who had no website and 1 year on get 10% of new work from it. The landscape gardener with a Forces background, definitely someone not used to the internet and its workings, and who didn’t believe in it, and who now attracts 4 enquiries a week from his site. And while many of these businesses remain reluctant to enter the word of social media, they are benefitting from being online with a well-designed website to give that foundation presence online.

Moving to a world where websites are deemed ‘obsolete’ could make it easier for these businesses to get online, but our experience is that businesses who don’t embrace a website are much less likely to generate a successful social media presence. Internet confidence is everything, and a website is the cornerstone of that. And we think there’s plenty of life in the website yet.