Do I need a website?

Website = birth certificate?

If you're asking if a website will start your business, the answer is usually no. When I started my freelancing, this is the very same false assumption that I had myself. Turns out, the website was just an expensive way to hide from the very people who maybe needed what I was offering. The problem? I wasn't talking to them, because I sat at my computer staring at my inbox. "When was my website going to start working?" 

The false assumption of publicity

I thought that, since I now had a website, the whole world could find what I was selling. I was on the internet, my services available to everyone; if that's not publicity, what is? So I sat for a while, waiting for people to contact me through my website. After I while I thought maybe I needed to spend some money on ads, just to increase traffic a bit. A couple hundred dollars later, still nothing. Not only was I on the internet, I was also spending money to make sure that people were finding me. I was paying for publicity, and still I saw no fruits. I was hiding from the people I was trying to reach, because I assumed they would just find me on their own. The lesson I learned, in the words of Seth Godin: "go make a ruckus". A website is not publicity, unless people already know you exist.

When to scale

If you've already made a ruckus, or a tinkering of noise and people have noticed you, you're getting calls and your days are full - then it might be time to upgrade your online presence. Relying on things like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok is like living on rented land, where you're at the mercy of an algorithm outside of your control. One change, and your entire customer base disapears overnight, because your content is no longer reaching the right people, or is being buried under a mountain of noise.

To sound cliché, at this stage a website is no longer 'just' a billboard, but it's your town square. You need a place for the people who know you to go, and when they get there, to know right away that they've come to the place they intended to.

Think of downtown Kelowna, or wherever you're from. If someone blindfolded you and dropped you off somewhere, took off the blindfold and you saw the statue of the sails, or of the dolphins, you would know instantly where you are. Your website should do the exact same thing - because when someone clicks a link, they're blindfolded. They have no idea where that link might take them, they only have an expectation.

Why the trust signal needs to be instant

According to Databox information from September 2024, the median bounce rate across all industries is 44.04%. That means roughly half the people landing on your site leave again within several seconds. Keep in mind that this is an average, if a visitor doesn't understand where they are within the first 2 seconds, that bounce rate is much higher. It's crucial that the 'trust signal' is instant, and that it matches the visitors expectation.

Website over business card

Giving the visitor peace of mind upon arrival is only one of the benefits of a website over a business card or social media. You have full freedom of your online presence, the way you and your business look, and feel. A banner created by GPT looks cool, but it also looks like it was created by ai.

The same as when a user sees images on a website that look like they were created by ai, or even reads a text with a bunch of long dashes in it. That screams ai, and instantly lowers a visitors' trust. In fact while searching for the statistic mentioned above, I came across an interesting article only to realize that there was a very high likelihood that it had been written by ai, so I couldn't use the article as I didn't trust the numbers (ai has been known to create statistics out of the blue). This is not something you want.

Having said all that, there is a difference between a profesional website and one you made yourself, and here's a short article about the potential benefits of making your own website. Not all websites are equal, and not all of them have the same purpose. Whatever you decide to do, don't use the 'website or no website' argument to delay your journey. Learn from my mistake, and go out there and get noticed before you decide to get a website. Once you've done that, you can always check me out ;)