Practical writing on web design, development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting. No filler, no recycled advice.
1682 Articles / 23 Topics / 2.1M Words
1682 articles
Compliance
A gift card is somebody else's money sitting on your balance sheet.
Compliance
They forgot they were paying you. That is not a strategy.
Compliance
Your first Quebec order arrives with rules attached.
Compliance
You are handling other people's card details. That comes with conditions.
Technical
The site being down and the domain being down look identical.
Technical
Valid markup describing the wrong hours is worse than no markup at all.
Technical
A 404 means the page is not there. A 500 means something is broken.
Technical
The transfer is easy. Everything that depends on the domain needs planning.
Technical
Go to enforcement too early and the mail you block is your own.
Technical
Your domain, your website, and your email are three separate things joined by DNS.
Analytics
Watching ten sessions answers questions no report will.
Analytics
A three percent conversion rate can be six on desktop and under one on mobile.
Analytics
Facebook, facebook, and FB are three different sources in your reports.
Analytics
The first question is not what caused it. It is whether anything actually dropped.
Analytics
The last click is usually the least persuasive thing that happened.
Analytics
The direct traffic bucket is where measurement goes to give up.
Search
Search traffic rising can mean your marketing worked, or that more people knew you.
Search
The only place you can see what people searched before they found you.
Search
Most posts that are not ranking are not broken. They are new and unlinked.
Search
Schema does not raise rankings. It makes a page unambiguous.
Search
FAQ markup no longer produces a search feature. The questions still do work.
Search
They are rarely doing something clever. Usually one thing you are not.
Search
Five half-finished topics achieve less than one finished one.
Search
Volume counts who typed it, not who wanted to hire someone.
Search
Ranking for a term nobody buys from is a result rather than an outcome.
Web Design
Projects rarely stall on the building. They stall waiting for content.
Web Design
The raw material only exists inside your business. The shaping does not.
Web Design
Design changes are cheap. Structure changes break links and rankings.
Web Design
Your site is judged against two others open in adjacent tabs.
Web Design
A half-maintained second language is worse than one language done well.
Web Design
The page count follows from what people search for, not from what a template provides.
Web Design
Visitors cannot always name what is wrong with a stock photo, but they notice.
Web Design
Most service pages describe the service. Very few answer the questions being asked.
Web Design
Nobody reads an About page out of curiosity. They read it to decide something.
Local Marketing
You can spend a year on a website and lose the job in the first thirty seconds.
Local Marketing
One good partner sends more work in a year than a hundred happy customers.
Local Marketing
You will not outspend them. There are things they structurally cannot do.
Local Marketing
A second location does not inherit the reputation of the first one.
Local Marketing
A page for every neighbourhood is a plan to write forty pages with nothing in them.
Local Marketing
The searching that produces October's calls started in August.
Local Marketing
Directories copy each other, so one old number can propagate for years.
Local Marketing
Hiding your address is allowed. Not having one at all is a different problem.
Local Marketing
Upload nothing and your listing is illustrated by whoever passed by.
Local Marketing
Profile posts are not a ranking tactic. They are your one editable surface.
Conversion
Most of your traffic is not ready to buy, and most sites offer that group nothing.
Conversion
Spam does not cost you time. It costs you the enquiry you deleted with it.
Conversion
A tapped number that rings out is a conversion you paid for and threw away.
Conversion
Nobody hesitates over a button. They hesitate over what they think it starts.
Conversion
Every step between arriving and acting is a place to leave.
Conversion
Booking works when the job has a standard shape. Most trades work does not.
Conversion
You have never had more of someone's attention than right after they enquire.
Conversion
Removing one channel does not redirect those people. It loses most of them.
Performance
On a mobile connection, the number of requests matters more than their size.
Performance
A perfect speed score and a slow site for real visitors are entirely compatible.
Performance
A background video can outweigh every other element on the page combined.
Performance
Several layers hold a copy of your site, and they do not update together.
Performance
Your second visit on office wifi is the least representative test available.
Performance
Lazy loading the top image delays the one thing the visitor came to see.
Performance
A chat widget nobody answers still costs every visitor the same to load.
Performance
Four families at three weights each is twelve downloads before a word appears.
Performance
The most expensive mistake is sending a desktop photograph to a phone.
Hosting
Sites rarely outgrow hosting all at once. They hit one ceiling at a time.
Hosting
An expired certificate does not degrade the site. It replaces it with a warning.
Hosting
Editing live means your customers are the testing environment.
Hosting
How a provider answers these ten tells you how the first outage will go.
Hosting
Uptime guarantees describe what a host will refund, not what they will prevent.
Hosting
A migration should be invisible. The order of operations is what makes it invisible.
Hosting
You cannot choose your neighbours on a shared server, and you inherit their behaviour.
Hosting
The advertised price and the price you pay in year two are rarely the same number.
Hosting
A shared address means inheriting the behaviour of everyone else on it.
Hosting
An untested backup is a belief rather than a safeguard.
Hosting
The question is not whether your site will go down. It is who finds out first.
Consulting
Month one should produce clarity, not campaigns.
Consulting
Cutting marketing in a quiet quarter is how a slow season becomes a slow year.
Consulting
Finished and handed over are two different things, and the gap is rarely accidental.
Consulting
A low quote is not a discount on the same project. It is a different project.
Consulting
A build circling through revisions is usually solving a strategy problem with design.
Consulting
Plans fail on capacity far more often than on ambition.
Consulting
A report says what happened. A review decides what changes because of it.
Consulting
Spreading $1,500 across five channels produces five results too small to read.
Consulting
The real question is where the boundary sits, and who owns each side of it.
Consulting
Bursts of effort followed by six weeks of silence is the signature of work with no owner.
Consulting
The gap between what you pictured and what arrived is nearly always a briefing gap.
Consulting
Three figures set a defensible budget, and none of them is a percentage of revenue.
Web Design
Describe your business in three sentences, then read your homepage.
Compliance
An American template describes obligations that do not apply to you and omits the ones that do.
Local Marketing
A list of people who asked to hear from you is unaffected by anyone else's decisions.
Local Marketing
Three neglected accounts produce nothing but doubt.
Compliance
Eight months of silence followed by a large campaign is the most reliable route to a spam folder.
Compliance
The sender has to prove consent. If you cannot demonstrate it, the law treats it as absent.
Domains
The system depended on one email address staying monitored for a decade.
Hosting
Choose it when you are choosing anyway. Do not migrate a working site for it unless a contract requires it.
Hosting
If your site is slow, fix the site first. If it is still slow, then consider the hosting.
Domains
Buy the name because it is the right name. Treat any inherited standing as incidental.
Domains
The most expensive thing you can reveal is how much you want it.
Domains
The restriction is what gives .ca its meaning. Not anyone can get one, and that is the point.
Domains
Say it aloud once to someone who does not know your business, then ask them to type it.
Technical
A CDN distributes your problems efficiently. It does not fix them.
Technical
Google found 89 percent of users misread the padlock. That is why it is gone.
Technical
A decision made carelessly in week one is still costing money in year five.
Technical
The most valuable thing a sitemap produces is the gap between submitted and indexed.
Technical
One character separates blocking nothing from blocking everything, and the failure is silent.
Technical
It is a hint, not a command, and it does not remove anything.
Technical
If you are unsure which type you need, you almost certainly need permanent.
Search
Nobody finds a plumber through image search. Fix the file sizes anyway, because that is where the benefit is.
Search
Add something that was not there before. Rearranging an adequate page rarely helps.
Search
Low traffic and no value are different things, and the difference is where the damage happens.
Search
Competitors are writing service pages while customers are typing symptoms.
Search
There is no penalty. There is selection, and the difference changes the remedy entirely.
Search
Invisible work with no deliverable, which is exactly why almost nobody does it properly.
Search
One of these influences ranking. The other does not and is usually rewritten anyway.
Analytics
A metric incapable of delivering bad news cannot inform a decision.
Analytics
The practitioners telling you the aggressive setup is safe are mostly the ones selling call tracking.
Analytics
If this number doubled, would revenue move? Most tracked events fail that test.
Analytics
The old metric counted an eight-minute satisfied reader as a bounce. That is why it produced so many bad decisions.
Analytics
For an owner wanting simple visitor numbers, GA4 is genuinely a worse tool. That is a real cost, not a misunderstanding.
Accessibility
Most form accessibility problems surface within two minutes of trying to complete it without a mouse.
Accessibility
Light grey on white looks refined on a calibrated monitor. On a phone outdoors it is close to invisible.
Accessibility
Not what is in the picture. What the reader would need to be told if it failed to load.
Accessibility
A national regulator examined the central marketing claim of this category and found it unsupported by evidence.
Local Marketing
The most valuable thing in your reviews is not the praise. It is the vocabulary.
Local Marketing
A claimed profile with stale hours and two reviews is worse than no profile at all.
Local Marketing
It arrives dressed as customer service, which is why so many businesses adopted it without noticing what it was.
Local Marketing
The reviewer is usually a lost cause. The readers are not. Write for the readers.
Local Marketing
Asking is encouraged. Several of the standard methods became formal violations in 2026.
Web Design
A 404 from an external link is a visitor someone else tried to send you.
Conversion
Those colour case studies are measuring contrast. The label is doing the actual work.
Web Design
Screens grew considerably. Hands did not. Convention still puts the main action in the hardest place to reach.
Web Design
Solutions could mean anything. The visitor has to translate before they can decide, and a proportion will not bother.
Conversion
The reader knows you selected them. Only specificity survives that.
Conversion
The competitor objection is the most cited and the weakest. They can just phone and ask.
Web Design
The top of the page is not where you put everything. It is where you earn the rest of the page.
Conversion
Every business claims to be trustworthy. What survives is anything a sceptic could go and check.
Conversion
The most expensive field is whichever one you do not need to take the next step.
Web Design
Sending is the easy part. Arriving is decided by reputation systems you cannot appeal to quickly.
Web Design
Rarely malice. Usually a sole operator whose circumstances changed, and everything sitting in their accounts.
Web Design
One of these mistakes removes your site from search entirely, and it is usually noticed weeks later.
Web Design
One cause accounts for most of the damage, and it is preventable with an inventory taken before anything is touched.
Web Design
Ask for the itemised list and check it against your platform. Some of it may not apply to your site at all.
Web Design
Core had six low-priority vulnerabilities all year. Plugins had 91 percent of eleven thousand.
Web Design
Three separate assets, routinely treated as one. Control fragments quietly and only becomes visible under pressure.
Web Design
Most disputes are not about quality. They are about the four things nobody wrote down.
Web Design
Two honest builders can quote the same brief tenfold apart, because they are pricing different projects.
Web Design
The deciding question is almost never the technology. It is who will be editing the site a year from now.
Search
Fewer businesses shown, call buttons removed. Rankings can hold while the phone goes quiet.
Web Design
What does my business do that a generic version of my industry does not?
Search
You cannot make a model cite you. You can make sure it has consistent material to work from.
Search
Twenty minutes to set up, and whatever it reports is a floor rather than a total.
Search
If your answer arrives in paragraph nine surrounded by context, there is nothing anyone can lift.
Consulting
Well-executed work on the wrong priority still produces nothing.
Hosting
Storage and bandwidth are on the comparison page. The things that determine the outcome are not.
Web Design
Websites do not fail loudly. They produce a business getting fewer enquiries with no idea why.
Consulting
If the retainer cannot be described in a sentence that mentions an outcome, the structure needs revisiting.
Search
Rarely a technique. Almost always consistency over time, which is why so few sustain it.
Publishing
Traffic falls, rates fall, and because revenue is a product, the declines multiply.
Publishing
Programmatic is a utility. Direct is a business. Stop treating the choice as a matter of principle.
Web Design
The changes that break websites are the ordinary consequences of a business doing well.
Web Design
Websites do not expire, they fail in specific ways. If you cannot name the failure, you have an itch.
Publishing
Poor vitals cost ad revenue too. Most of this conflict is losing money in both directions at once.
Publishing
Four terms multiply to produce ad revenue. Publishers obsess over the first and last.
Publishing
It is about whether finishing the page leaves the reader with another question.
Publishing
The cost is instant and visible. The benefit is slow and confounded.
Publishing
Three failure modes, three completely different fixes.
Publishing
Half the pixels for one continuous second. That explains why the top banner underperforms.
Local Marketing
The keyword is usually untouchable. The ad copy is not. And the answer is often to do nothing.
Local Marketing
Everyone writes 24/7 emergency service. Almost nobody answers the three questions being asked.
Web Design
Most trades sites optimise the form and leave the phone number in the footer as an image.
Web Design
A homeowner cannot judge your technical skill. They can absolutely judge a photograph.
Local Marketing
Location pages are legitimate until the only thing changing is the town name.
Performance
There is no single cliff, but there are three bands that matter.
Web Design
Five years of $99 a month is $5,940, and in most arrangements you own nothing at the end.
Local Marketing
Your profile probably wins today. That is changing as AI local results drop the call button.
Local Marketing
Referrals are the best work you get and the hardest channel to grow on purpose.
Web Design
Most trades websites are built like brochures when they should be phone-call machines.
Industry Guides
They want a ten by ten, this week, and to know what it costs.
Web Design
One page that is finished beats five that are half-written.
Content
If they are charging you to publish it, it is an advertisement.
Search
Eight weeks and the page does not exist as far as search is concerned.
Advertising
Search advertising answers a question. Social advertising asks one.
Local Marketing
Forty searches a month, and you want all forty of them.
Consulting
Twelve months later, did it work? Nobody can say.
Ecommerce
They own the customer. You own the fulfilment.
Email Marketing
Fifty addresses in the bcc field is a deliverability problem waiting to happen.
Reputation
The customer does not know it was not your crew. Neither does the review.
Security
The record-keeping obligation applies whether or not the breach was reportable.
Conversion
Silence usually means they got busy, not that they chose somebody else.
Technical
Every one of these has gone live broken on somebody's site this month.
Branding
Nobody searches for a Comfort Assurance Package.
Social Media
An account that stopped in March says something. Make sure it is what you meant.
Industry Guides
The tenant wants a repair form. The owner wants your fee. Same site.
Hosting
The hosting goes dark. The domain gets sold.
Accessibility
Close your eyes and try to find your phone number. That is the test.
Web Design
Nobody visits a team page to admire your organisational chart.
Analytics
Enquiries fell twenty percent since October. So did they last year.
Compliance
The skill-testing question is not a formality. It is why the contest is legal.
Industry Guides
They have one date. The first question is whether you are free.
Content
A property manager and a homeowner want opposite things from the same page.
Search
Ranking for that term would be impressive and would produce nothing.
Advertising
Pausing is free. Restarting is not.
Local Marketing
A translated service page is a page nobody local is competing for.
Performance
You cannot ask why it was built this way. Change what cannot break first.
Industry Guides
They love the work. They have no idea whether they can afford you.
Web Design
They printed your price list and got four pages of menu.
Consulting
Your site says I. There are now two of you, and the customer will notice.
Ecommerce
Your customer lives four streets away and the checkout is charging for courier delivery.
Email Marketing
A message to past customers before the season beats anything sent to strangers.
Reputation
A site you never heard of has your old phone number and a rating you never earned.
Security
A green dashboard is not the same as being secure.
Conversion
An unattended chat widget is a promise you are not keeping.
Technical
The site broke on Tuesday. Nobody can say what happened on Monday.
Branding
The uniform works at the door. The invoice works at the kitchen table.
Social Media
Four hundred followers, twelve of whom live in your service area.
Industry Guides
The parent wants results. The student wants to not feel stupid. Address both.
Content
Published in October, useless by December, still on your site three years later.
Search
You are first. For you, in your office. Nobody else sees that.
Web Design
Three competitors bought the same theme. Only one changed the photographs.
Advertising
A falling cost per click can mean the campaign got worse.
Local Marketing
You spoke to sixty people and collected four names. That was the problem.
Industry Guides
They want to know about availability, cost, and who works there. In that order.
Hosting
You put their site on your account as a favour. Now their downtime is your evening.
Accessibility
Your required fields are marked in red. Some visitors cannot see that.
Consulting
One client at forty percent of revenue is not a client. It is a risk.
Ecommerce
If you quote the same job at the same price twelve times a year, it is a product.
Email Marketing
Your booking confirmation is the most-read message you send.
Reputation
If you can buy the award, it is advertising rather than recognition.
Security
You restored last night's backup. The intruder was in there three weeks ago.
Conversion
They are hesitating over the phone field. One sentence would fix it.
Industry Guides
They are leaving a family member with a stranger for three hours.
Content
Their inspection report says three things they cannot look up anywhere local.
Search
One listing for two locations means you rank well in neither.
Web Design
Your best customers are the ones your interface was not designed for.
Domains
Nobody types your domain. They search your name and click.
Analytics
Six months later, nobody can remember what the numbers were before.
Compliance
You have to prove they agreed. Remembering that they did is not proof.
Technical
Six things happen before your logo appears. Any of them can be the slow one.
Branding
The new logo is the easy part. The redirects decide whether it works.
Social Media
Thirty seconds of the thing you are already doing beats a scripted studio piece.
Industry Guides
Half your website visits are somebody frightened at an hour you are closed.
Advertising
Following someone for ninety days after one visit is how remarketing got its reputation.
Local Marketing
Five thousand flyers and no idea whether any of them worked.
Web Design
Ninety photographs means nobody sees any of them properly.
Content
They are not worried about the work. They are worried about the week it takes.
Search
There is no separate voice optimisation. There is answering questions clearly.
Industry Guides
They want to see your work and know what it costs. Both are usually missing.
Consulting
If the work comes because people know you, there may be nothing to sell.
Ecommerce
They are reading your returns policy before they buy, not after.
Email Marketing
They gave you their address in 2023 and have heard nothing since.
Reputation
You cannot delete it. You can make it the eleventh result instead of the second.
Security
They handed back the keys. Nobody thought about the mailbox.
Conversion
Three overlays before the content. Two of them were legally required.
Industry Guides
They are not worried about your equipment. They are worried about the room.
Web Design
Copyright 2019. They have already decided you might not exist.
Advertising
A twenty kilometre circle includes water, farmland, and a town you refuse to drive to.
Local Marketing
They need a plumber, an electrician, and a roofer, and they know nobody.
Technical
A quote from a free email address is read differently.
Branding
Your website, your quotes, and your van are three different businesses.
Social Media
Somebody in that group is asking for your trade this week.
Hosting
Putting your blog on a subdomain splits the thing you were trying to build.
Accessibility
For some visitors, your scrolling effect causes actual nausea.
Content
You already did the hard part. The rest is reformatting.
Search
They rank for 'furnace repair' and the page says 'heating system service'.
Performance
Twenty-eight plugins, four of them doing something you still use.
Industry Guides
Nobody books a table at a bakery. They want to know what time you open.
Web Design
Everything except your landing page is behind one tap most people never make.
Consulting
Any plan that needs a good week will not survive a bad one.
Ecommerce
Someone searched for it, found it, and it is unavailable. What happens next is up to the page.
Email Marketing
Your open rate went up because of a privacy feature, not your subject line.
Reputation
They are looking at your finished tile. They are also looking at the mess behind it.
Security
It stops the automated attempts. It does not stop you using a weak password.
Conversion
It only fires on people who already decided to go. That is the whole argument.
Industry Guides
Menu, hours, location, and how to book. Everything else is decoration.
Analytics
Your best enquiries arrive by phone and appear nowhere in your reporting.
Compliance
The requirements differ by province, and most businesses have never checked which apply.
Advertising
A click at three in the morning costs the same as one at ten.
Local Marketing
A local reporter needs a story this week. You have one and never mentioned it.
Content
Traffic that produces enquiries you decline is worse than no traffic.
Search
Forty listings with three different phone numbers is worse than ten that agree.
Industry Guides
Your client is comparing two numbers with no idea what is different behind them.
Web Design
Five options with overlapping features is a comparison nobody will finish.
Technical
With ten tabs open, the favicon is the only way anyone finds your page again.
Branding
Quality you can trust. So is everybody else's.
Social Media
Scheduled posts do not know what happened this morning.
Industry Guides
You will never beat the portal on listings. You can beat it on knowing the street.
Hosting
Two sites on one account share everything, including a compromise.
Accessibility
Some of your visitors have already set their text larger. Your site may be ignoring them.
Consulting
One of these needs a bigger van. The other needs a different one.
Ecommerce
Your category page is a landing page. It has no content on it.
Email Marketing
The best-performing email you send looks like an email, not a brochure.
Reputation
You wrote the testimonials page. Everyone reading it knows that.
Security
Your contact form sends email on behalf of anyone who fills it in.
Conversion
A review about punctuality belongs next to the booking form, not on a testimonials page.
Advertising
The same budget buys a bigger advertisement if you fill in the extra fields.
Local Marketing
The shop next door is asked for recommendations more often than you are.
Content
Your first paragraph is almost certainly deletable. Try it.
Search
You probably qualify for six links right now and have asked for none of them.
Web Design
A visitor scanning twenty equal items finds none of them.
Industry Guides
Everyone searches in March. The firms that win booked them in January.
Technical
Your pages can travel at a third of their size without changing a character.
Branding
Three seconds, at speed, from behind. Design for that.
Social Media
You are building an audience on land somebody else owns and can rezone.
Web Design
Almost nobody agrees on what an unlabelled icon means.
Industry Guides
Nobody looks for a lawyer on a good day.
Content
Length is an output of answering properly, not a target to hit.
Search
A report listing eighty errors is not an audit. It is a tool output with a logo.
Advertising
You cannot outbid them. You can be more relevant, which costs less.
Local Marketing
A rink board is not marketing. It becomes marketing when somebody links to you.
Analytics
One person visiting twice on two devices is two users and two sessions.
Compliance
You own the photograph. You do not automatically own the right to publish it.
Industry Guides
They are not choosing a clinic. They are choosing a practitioner.
Consulting
Without this number, every marketing decision is a matter of opinion.
Ecommerce
A payment link is a store with one item and no maintenance.
Email Marketing
You do not need behavioural scoring. You need to know who had what done.
Reputation
Almost nobody writes a bad review as their first move.
Security
The invoice is from a supplier you use, and the bank details have changed.
Conversion
If your page says nothing about price, the cheapest quote frames the comparison.
Web Design
A service page with the form at the bottom asks people to read everything first.
Performance
Every millisecond the server takes is a millisecond before the browser can begin.
Industry Guides
A meaningful share of your prospective patients are avoiding you out of anxiety.
Content
Nobody clicks to find out what your page is about. They click because they know.
Search
Three months is the honest answer to a question with six different answers.
Hosting
Most site owners use one section of a panel that has forty.
Accessibility
A table without headers is a list of numbers with no idea what they measure.
Technical
Analytics shows you the visitors who ran your script. The log shows you everyone.
Branding
A typeface nobody notices is a typeface doing its job.
Social Media
An embedded feed showing your last post from March is proof of the wrong thing.
Advertising
Somebody standing in a flooding basement is not going to read your service page.
Local Marketing
You can be findable in a week without a website. Not without a listing.
Web Design
The same five fields can feel like a conversation or like an application.
Industry Guides
Half your customers arrive expecting to be overcharged. Start there.
Consulting
The service you dread is on your website, so the enquiries keep arriving.
Ecommerce
Every extra checkout page is a place to change your mind.
Email Marketing
The highest open rate you will ever get is the message most businesses never send.
Reputation
Nothing is perfect for forty consecutive customers. Buyers know that.
Security
Your last web designer probably still has access. So does the employee who left.
Conversion
Free quote is not an offer. It is what everybody already does.
Industry Guides
Everything they own, in a truck, driven by people they met that morning.
Content
Nobody can photograph a correctly wired junction box behind drywall.
Search
Every internal link is a chance to say what a page is about. Most say click here.
Web Design
Two heading levels that look the same are one heading level.
Advertising
They clicked because of a specific sentence. Show them that sentence again.
Local Marketing
A stranger can answer a question about your business, and their answer stays.
Industry Guides
You are asking for a key to their home while they are at work.
Domains
Register a domain without privacy and your home address is publicly queryable.
Analytics
Your most engaged visitor is you, and you are never going to enquire.
Compliance
Found on the internet is not a licence. It is how the demand letter finds you.
Technical
The page looks fine and the console has been reporting an error for two years.
Branding
The colour on your screen and the colour on your van are two different colours.
Social Media
The response time on your page is visible. So is the message you never answered.
Web Design
An underlined word that is not a link is a small betrayal repeated on every page.
Content
A case study without a difficulty in it is a brochure with a customer's name on top.
Search
A heading used to make text bigger is a heading telling engines something untrue.
Industry Guides
You are asking for someone's house for four months. Photographs are not enough.
Consulting
If you win almost every quote, your prices are too low.
Ecommerce
A shipping cost revealed at the last step is the most common reason carts are abandoned.
Email Marketing
An unsubscribe tells you something. Silence tells you the same thing later.
Reputation
A review process that depends on remembering is a review process that stops.
Security
The two ways to handle updates badly are never and immediately.
Conversion
Nobody is reassured by a guarantee that does not say what it covers.
Hosting
The cloud is a building with very good air conditioning and two power feeds.
Accessibility
Most people watching your video have the sound off, whether or not they can hear.
Industry Guides
Nobody buys flooring from a photograph. Plenty of people rule you out from one.
Advertising
Every campaign is paying for searches nobody has looked at.
Local Marketing
The services section is free space to describe your work in the customer's words.
Web Design
The footer is on every page of your site and was designed on none of them.
Content
You have given this answer forty times. Writing it down once is the whole job.
Search
One page, one main term. Two pages chasing the same words means neither wins.
Industry Guides
The customer judges the paint. The job is decided by preparation they never see.
Technical
FTP is a moving van for your files. Plain FTP sends the keys in the open.
Branding
A beautiful logo you only have as a JPEG is a logo you cannot use.
Social Media
The before photograph is the one nobody takes, and the one that sells the work.
Consulting
Stop marketing when you are busy and you will be quiet in three months.
Ecommerce
If your description is the manufacturer's, so is everyone else's.
Email Marketing
The subject line has one job, and being interesting is not it.
Reputation
Most inaccurate reviews stay. The public reply is what everyone reads afterwards.
Security
Cleaning the damage without finding the way in means doing it again next week.
Conversion
A countdown timer that resets when you reload is a claim your customer can check.
Web Design
If the page works with the image removed, the image was decoration.
Performance
A speed test on default settings measures a visitor you may not have.
Industry Guides
Your best photographs and your quietest months arrive at opposite ends of the year.
Advertising
You are not buying keywords. You are buying the platform's interpretation of them.
Local Marketing
A customer who drives to a closed business leaves a review about it.
Content
Your reader is scanning for the answer. Put it first.
Search
A page that is not indexed is not ranking badly. It is not competing at all.
Industry Guides
In January the lead is no heat. In July it is no cooling. Most sites lead with neither.
Analytics
Your first month is an inspection, not a scorecard.
Compliance
A site with no name behind it reads as a business that might not exist next month.
Web Design
Adding a third message to the top of the page usually removes the first two.
Hosting
Nobody runs out of disk space. Plenty of sites hit the limits nobody advertises.
Accessibility
Read your links aloud without the sentences around them. That is what some people hear.
Industry Guides
One caller has water coming in. The other is planning for next spring.
Technical
A website is a folder of files. Knowing which folder solves half the mysteries.
Branding
If you have to spell it every time you say it, it will cost you enquiries forever.
Social Media
You do not need something to announce. You need something to show.
Consulting
You bought the business. Establishing what you actually control comes first.
Ecommerce
The lighting matters more than the camera. A window beats a light you do not own.
Email Marketing
You probably already have a list. It is sitting in your invoicing system.
Reputation
An unclaimed listing is a page about your business that anyone can edit but you.
Security
The point of two-factor is that a leaked password stops being sufficient.
Conversion
Three equally weighted buttons means the page has no recommendation.
Advertising
A budget too small to produce a readable result is worse than not advertising.
Local Marketing
A complete profile in the wrong category is invisible for the searches that matter.
Content
A post every month for two years beats twelve posts in March.
Search
A page nothing links to is a page search engines have no route to.
Web Design
A homepage is not a brochure cover. It is a routing decision made in ten seconds.
Industry Guides
Nobody hires an unlicensed electrician on purpose. Prove it above the fold.
Ecommerce
Most service businesses do not need a store. Some are leaving money on the table.
Advertising
Advertising buys attention. It does not buy a site that converts the attention.
Social Media
Four abandoned profiles say more about your business than one active account.
Performance
Showing something in half a second beats showing everything in two.
Compliance
Most small sites need three legal pages. Most have none or the wrong ones.
Accessibility
An inaccessible site is not a moral failing. It is enquiries you never hear about.
Reputation
Someone was given your name. What they find next decides whether they call.
Email Marketing
Nobody is waiting for your newsletter. They might be waiting for a reminder.
Security
One reused password is one breach away from every account you own.
Local Marketing
For many local businesses the listing produces more calls than the website does.
Content
You already answer these questions every week. Writing them down is the blog.
Conversion
Doubling your traffic doubles a problem you have not fixed yet.
Domains
You do not buy a domain. You lease it, and the lease has to be renewed.
Analytics
Most small business analytics accounts count visitors and nothing else.
Branding
Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.
Web Design
A first website has one job: turn people who find you into people who contact you.
Hosting
Your domain is the address. Hosting is the building. Usually rented from different people.
Search
Most of what is sold as SEO for a local business is four or five ordinary jobs.
Domains
The name was perfect. Everything close to it was taken.
Advertising
You bid more than they did and appeared below them.
Consulting
You quoted before you knew about the stairs.
Industry Guides
It snowed overnight. Everybody wants to know when you are coming.
Accessibility
Put the mouse down and try to reach the contact form.
Security
A spreadsheet from 2019 on a laptop nobody uses.
Teardowns
They are interviewing three agents and cannot tell them apart.
Industry Guides
The hotel does not care about your machines. They care that Tuesday happens.
Compliance
Seven years of invoices and eleven years of customer phone numbers.
Industry Guides
They budgeted for the pool. Nobody mentioned what a season costs to run.
Analytics
Three tools, three numbers, one month.
Teardowns
They are comparing on price and cannot see what differs.
Industry Guides
They want to know what to serve six people and how much to buy.
Web Design
A homeowner and a facilities manager landed on the same page.
Performance
Two seconds on your desk. Eleven in a van with one bar.
Industry Guides
Tuition was the small part. Then came the costume fees.
Ecommerce
They reached the payment step and you did not take the card they had.
Content
Your best three projects are the ones you are not allowed to mention.
Conversion
Their finger is over the button. This is the second that decides it.
Industry Guides
They think going to their own bank is the safe option.
Teardowns
Every quote is a different number and they cannot tell why.
Local Marketing
You have been selected as a top business in your area. There is a fee.
Hosting
They keep the server running. They do not keep your site working.
Reputation
You fixed it twice. There is a third thing now.
Technical
You wanted to edit text. You got something that needs updating monthly.
Industry Guides
They are locked out and the first three results are call centres.
Consulting
The final payment is the one that goes missing.
Search
Guaranteed first page. That promise is the warning.
Industry Guides
They are booking in February for July, and want to know who will be there.
Security
The laptop was in the van. The van was broken into.
Email Marketing
Two thousand subscribers. Four hundred have opened anything in a year.
Industry Guides
They need to dig a trench. They do not know what to ask for.
Advertising
You turned it off in November. In March you started from nothing.
Teardowns
They wanted a birthday cake with three days notice. Your site said nothing.
Industry Guides
Their server is down and they are calling whoever answers.
Branding
Consistency is free. It is also the part most businesses skip.
Teardowns
They want a price for hair like theirs, and whether Thursday is free.
Industry Guides
They do not know where the tank is or when it was last pumped.
Web Design
Nine identical boxes. The visitor reads none of them.
Analytics
Impressions up forty percent. Enquiries unchanged. Both are in the report.
Compliance
The banner appeared, everything loaded anyway, and nothing was consented to.
Ecommerce
They got to shipping, saw the cost, and closed the tab.
Industry Guides
Three quotes, three different brands, and no way to compare any of it.
Content
They printed it and stuck it inside the cupboard door.
Conversion
Eleven minutes, four websites, one phone call.
Local Marketing
Four vans on one street beats one van in four suburbs.
Teardowns
They received a letter they do not understand and it has a deadline.
Industry Guides
They want to know the monthly cost and how long they are tied in.
Social Media
Forty people saw the complaint. Four hundred will see how you answered.
Domains
The .com is gone. That is less of a problem than it feels.
Consulting
You are not billing forty hours a week. Nobody is.
Reputation
They would have left one. Nobody asked.
Security
You stopped using it in 2019. It still has your customer list.
Technical
The form says thank you. Nobody receives anything.
Industry Guides
They have five days and no idea what a good inspection includes.
Hosting
The expensive certificate encrypts exactly as well as the free one.
Teardowns
They are on a waitlist somewhere else and hoping you have space.
Performance
That photograph is four megabytes. It displays at eight hundred pixels wide.
Industry Guides
Reupholstering the sofa costs more than a new sofa. Say so early.
Search
Somebody searched for a deck design. Your photograph was the result.
Email Marketing
They contacted four businesses. Two replied. You were second.
Industry Guides
What happens if it rains, and how hard is this actually.
Advertising
Four channels, none of them with enough money to work.
Accessibility
Alt text saying image1.jpg helps nobody.
Industry Guides
Do you have them in yet, and will they grow in my yard.
Teardowns
They are leaving their dog with a stranger for a week.
Industry Guides
The fridge stopped working. Is that a mechanic or a plumber.
Web Design
Nobody watched the two-minute introduction from the owner.
Ecommerce
Your shipping estimate was wrong. Everything else was too.
Content
People read captions who never read the paragraph above them.
Conversion
Three columns, and the middle one has more ticks.
Local Marketing
You paid the fee. You attended once. That is the whole story.
Industry Guides
They have three years of receipts in a box and they are ashamed of it.
Analytics
You are collecting data you have never looked at and are responsible for.
Teardowns
They are pricing twelve hundred square feet and cannot find a number.
Consulting
You are not obliged to keep a client forever.
Industry Guides
They want lunch. Where are you right now.
Security
If you were in hospital tomorrow, could anybody run the business.
Compliance
Vagueness is not a defence. Neither is being technically true.
Reputation
Your supplier failed. The review will name you.
Technical
It works in the simulator. The simulator is not a phone.
Industry Guides
They want a refill and to know if you deliver.
Teardowns
They are about to hand somebody a hundred thousand dollars and a key.
Industry Guides
Is the course open, what does it cost, and can I get on at four.
Hosting
The specifications are identical. The support is not.
Industry Guides
They have a folder of rooms they love and a budget they have not calculated.
Branding
You registered the name. That is not the same as owning it.
Search
Twelve pages, one paragraph each, the town name swapped.
Email Marketing
Tuesday at ten is not a strategy.
Teardowns
The water is off and they are looking at three sites on a phone.
Industry Guides
No candidates means no clients. The candidate side is the product.
Advertising
Managing it yourself is free until you count the hours.
Ecommerce
They are opening it. That is the only moment you get.
Content
You explain it perfectly on the phone. Then you write leveraging synergies.
Conversion
They did not ask because they did not want to look ignorant.
Industry Guides
They are comparing your quote to one that skipped the base preparation.
Web Design
A form and nothing else. No hours, no address, no idea who answers.
Local Marketing
The realtor is asked for a plumber four times a month.
Performance
Four weights, two families, and you use two of them.
Teardowns
There is a stain on the ceiling and it is getting bigger.
Domains
The moment they know you want it, the price changes.
Industry Guides
They want to know if the taproom is open and whether the seasonal is back.
Consulting
Free estimates attract people collecting free estimates.
Security
The site is a copy. The domain is the business.
Industry Guides
They need it delivered today. That is the entire question.
Analytics
Direct traffic is not people typing your address.
Reputation
They named the other company in your review. Do not name them back.
Teardowns
It is thirty-four degrees and the air conditioning stopped.
Technical
404. Page not found. That is the whole page.
Industry Guides
The city told them they need an engineer. That is all they know.
Social Media
They looked at your page before deciding whether to apply.
Industry Guides
Gold package. Platinum package. Nobody knows what either includes.
Compliance
You took the photo. That settles copyright, not permission.
Industry Guides
They need it across town in two hours. Can you or not.
Teardowns
An owner wants the fee. A tenant wants to report a leak. Same site.
Hosting
Unlimited bandwidth, subject to a number they will not tell you.
Ecommerce
Nothing has a five star average. Shoppers know that.
Content
They can write it well. They cannot know what you know.
Conversion
Three numbers, a nine hundred dollar spread, and no way to tell why.
Search
They typed a whole sentence. Your page is titled Services.
Industry Guides
They want it gone today. They have no idea what a half load is.
Email Marketing
Nobody wants a monthly update from their plumber.
Local Marketing
Somebody already created a listing for you. It has your old number.
Industry Guides
They want to know how many visits this is going to be.
Advertising
You pay when somebody contacts you, not when they click.
Web Design
The button is at the top. The thumb is at the bottom.
Teardowns
The report card came home. They are looking tonight.
Consulting
Whose customer is it, and whose fault was that.
Industry Guides
One house is a loss. Six on the same street is a good day.
Security
Same supplier, same amount, new account number.
Accessibility
Your body text is 13 pixels and grey. Nobody over forty is reading it.
Industry Guides
They hurt their back. They do not know if they need a doctor first.
Teardowns
They are moving on Saturday. They need a price and a size, now.
Reputation
We are sorry you feel that way is not an apology.
Analytics
It knows they left. It does not know they got a better quote elsewhere.
Technical
Twelve pages do not need a search box. They need a better menu.
Industry Guides
They were told to get something notarised. That is the whole brief they have.
Branding
You paid for the photographs. That does not mean you own them.
Performance
A score of 94 on a desktop test tells you very little.
Industry Guides
Forty people, a Saturday in September, and no idea what that costs.
Teardowns
They have not been in six years and they are embarrassed about it.
Industry Guides
They want a tent for eighty people. Will it fit in the garden or not.
Ecommerce
The filter sale is worth four dollars. The customer coming back is worth more.
Content
They are not paying for the part. They are paying for knowing which part.
Conversion
They sent the form. Now they are wondering whether it worked.
Local Marketing
They said the roof guy. That was the whole recommendation.
Industry Guides
A branch came down in the storm. They want somebody insured, today.
Hosting
The update broke the contact form. You found out from a customer.
Domains
Two domains means building the same standing twice.
Compliance
Ontario has thresholds. Human rights law has none.
Consulting
The argument is never about the work. It is about what the work was.
Teardowns
They are unwell, it is Sunday, and they cannot tell if you take new patients.
Search
The searches start eight weeks before the phone does.
Email Marketing
A message that looks like a newsletter gets treated like one.
Industry Guides
Water is running down the wall. They are not researching gutter systems.
Security
Losing it is bad. Somebody else posting from it is worse.
Web Design
Four different people just arrived. They want four different things.
Advertising
They searched for a burst pipe. Your ad says quality workmanship since 1998.
Industry Guides
They have a folder of kitchens they like. They have no idea what any cost.
Teardowns
A warning light came on. They are deciding between you and the dealership.
Industry Guides
They found you on a booking site. Now they are checking whether to book direct.
Reputation
Wait a day. Then write the reply for the people reading it later.
Technical
Their outage is now your outage. Their tracking is now your disclosure.
Industry Guides
They are comparing your quote to one that skipped the waterproofing.
Analytics
If it takes longer than four minutes, you will stop opening it.
Industry Guides
They want to know if their child will get hurt. Say something about it.
Teardowns
Three painters quoted. Two of them explained what preparation means.
Ecommerce
Suggest what they will need. Not what you want to shift.
Content
You answered the same question four times this month. That is a page.
Conversion
They filled in three fields and hit one they did not want to answer.
Industry Guides
They sent a logo from a website. It is 400 pixels wide and they want a banner.
Local Marketing
You added six town names to the site. Nothing happened.
Social Media
Take the before shot. You will not get another chance.
Consulting
You can do it. That is not the same as it being worth doing.
Industry Guides
They want to know what it costs before they are willing to ask.
Teardowns
One date, six suppliers. You are the one who did not say a price.
Security
The bigger risk is the person behind you, not the network.
Hosting
Your customers are in one province. Your server is on another continent.
Industry Guides
They have a twenty-eight foot cruiser. Can you haul it or not.
Web Design
A third of your visitors will never see anything below the first screen.
Performance
Two seconds of blank screen feels worse than four seconds of content arriving.
Search
They heard about you from a neighbour. Now they are checking.
Email Marketing
You send four hundred emails a month. Each one ends the same way.
Industry Guides
They want to know what it costs in total, not per hour.
Compliance
Why does a quote form ask for a date of birth.
Teardowns
Half the panel is dead and they are standing in the dark with a phone.
Advertising
Ninety thousand impressions and one enquiry. Both numbers are real.
Industry Guides
They want to know how you get paid. Most advisor sites never say.
Branding
If it does not work at the size of a van door, it does not work.
Accessibility
You cannot see where you are. Neither can anybody else.
Reputation
One customer photograph outweighs eleven of yours.
Technical
Forty files called image1 through image40, and one of them is your logo.
Industry Guides
They want the price, the day, and whether their child needs an instrument first.
Teardowns
Six people are deciding where to eat. Your menu is a PDF.
Ecommerce
They ordered it. You do not have it. Now what.
Content
A headline that overpromises gets the click and loses the reader.
Conversion
They booked a slot you cannot deliver. That is worse than the enquiry you avoided.
Industry Guides
They want to know if you have a turkey big enough. In October.
Local Marketing
Two thousand flyers and four calls. Whether that failed depends on the job value.
Analytics
Your conversion rate is the average of a good number and a terrible one.
Domains
Transferring the domain does not move your email. That surprises people.
Industry Guides
They do not want it shipped. They want to know if you have it now.
Consulting
While you are here, could you just.
Industry Guides
Their insurer asked for a certificate. They have no idea what that means.
Teardowns
They are nervous about walking in. Your site shows people who already look like that.
Security
Somebody who left in 2021 can still edit your business listing.
Industry Guides
They were told to use a preferred shop. They do not know they can choose.
Web Design
Three people took these photos. It shows.
Hosting
99.9% uptime allows your site to be down during your busiest morning.
Teardowns
The dog has been vomiting since midnight. They need to know if you are open.
Industry Guides
They drove ninety minutes for a bike that sold last Tuesday.
Search
A page from four years ago is telling customers something you stopped doing.
Email Marketing
Set it up in an afternoon. It books work for years.
Industry Guides
They want an eye exam, and they want to know what their plan covers.
Reputation
Your best review and your worst are describing the same fortnight.
Advertising
It worked for three months and then it did not. That is not always the advertisement.
Technical
Supporting everything costs money and slows the site for everybody else.
Industry Guides
They have a thirty-two foot trailer and a long weekend. Will it fit or not.
Ecommerce
They paid at 2am. The file has to arrive without you.
Teardowns
They have a budget and a yard. Your site has a photo of somebody else's garden.
Content
Ask for a blog post and you get nothing. Ask what went wrong today and you get four.
Conversion
Free consultation is what a site says when it will not say a price.
Compliance
Your terms mention a jurisdiction you have never operated in.
Industry Guides
They want a fence. They also want to know whose side the posts go on.
Performance
They did not judge your site as slow. They just left.
Local Marketing
You have been surprised by the same February for eleven years.
Industry Guides
It snowed. Two hundred people want an appointment this week.
Security
One password, five people, and no idea who used it.
Consulting
They are not stalling. They are stuck on something they have not told you.
Industry Guides
They need it certified for an application due Friday. That is the whole enquiry.
Analytics
Conversions fell forty percent. That means two people instead of three.
Teardowns
They loved the work. They still cannot tell whether they can afford you.
Industry Guides
They want to know what they take off and who will be in the room.
Web Design
Most people set dark mode on their phone. Far fewer arrive at your site asking for it.
Social Media
Twice a month for two years beats daily for six weeks.
Teardowns
They want a price for a three-bedroom house. You offer a free consultation.
Branding
You are sick of looking at it. Your customers see it four times a year.
Industry Guides
The fridge died last night. They are pricing a new one in another tab.
Hosting
You got mentioned on the radio. The site went down at nine.
Industry Guides
A contractor wants your rate. A homeowner wants the ceiling crack gone.
Ecommerce
A retail customer just found your trade price. Now what.
Content
Every job is different is true, and it is not an answer.
Conversion
They are not admiring your work. They are checking whether you will make a mess.
Search
A page nothing links to is a page nobody reaches.
Email Marketing
Twelve people left. That is information, not a verdict.
Teardowns
They are switching accountants in February. Your site is a stock handshake.
Reputation
Nobody can buy eleven years of people saying you turned up.
Technical
A page that already exists cannot be broken by a database that went down.
Local Marketing
They opened in March. Your quiet April was going to happen anyway.
Industry Guides
They found something in the kitchen last night. They are not browsing.
Consulting
Five days. Finish, do not start.
Consulting
Sort by whether you can undo it.
Web Design
Sometimes the answer is nothing.
Consulting
A list of fourteen improvements produces none of them, and a single change with a date and a named person produces one.
Consulting
One job type. Always the same one.
Consulting
You decided this last year too.
Consulting
Four years. Which decisions held?
Domains
A date without a lead time is no warning.
Hosting
Restore one. Time it. Write it down.
Security
Instead of listing your systems and asking who can reach them, list the people and ask what each one can still get into.
Consulting
Read a year of statements line by line and add up everything you did not deliberately decide to keep paying for.
Consulting
Who could stop you trading?
Content
The van in that picture was sold in 2021, the man on the left left in 2022, and the shop in the background is now a d.
Conversion
Never changed. Never checked.
Search
Four years, untouched, still working.
Content
Thirty published. Four worked.
Social Media
Your signature still says the old name.
Analytics
It is running. Is it correct?
Consulting
Did a number move? That is the test.
Consulting
Six events. One mattered.
Analytics
The peak magnifies the flaws.
Ecommerce
They all arrive in the same fortnight.
Local Marketing
Decided is not the same as published.
Conversion
Too late. Answer it well anyway.
Advertising
Same budget. Half the clicks.
Ecommerce
Twenty per cent off. Double the volume.
Conversion
Reuse paragraphs, not whole replies.
Reputation
They know what you told them Monday.
Compliance
A stated date is a term, not a slogan.
Ecommerce
Four phrases. Pick the honest one.
Ecommerce
You have decided the cutoff and written it on a shipping page, which is a page nobody visits before ordering.
Ecommerce
Six weeks. Here is the order.
Reputation
Say it once, plainly, early.
Branding
The quote covers the logo and the website, and the list of everything else runs to about thirty items nobody mentioned.
Branding
The invoice is the one they keep.
Branding
Write it the way you say it.
Branding
Thread, vinyl, and a stamp all break it.
Branding
Your category already has colours.
Branding
Ask. It takes one message.
Branding
Two audiences, one name, both confused.
Branding
What comes with you, and what does not.
Branding
They ask for you. That cuts both ways.
Teardowns
Nothing is wrong with it. That is the point.
Teardowns
Four directories above you.
Teardowns
Four questions. No answers.
Teardowns
One abandoned room in a tidy house.
Teardowns
Three quarters arrive on a phone.
Teardowns
Two clicks to the thing they came for.
Teardowns
Nobody has ever wanted this.
Teardowns
Three numbers. Which one works?
Teardowns
A password, for one appointment.
Teardowns
None of this is your work.
Teardowns
The menu is a file. It should be a page.
Industry Guides
The site is the demonstration.
Industry Guides
They are anxious. Answer that first.
Industry Guides
Can I visit, and can you ship?
Industry Guides
You are not a roofer. Say so first.
Industry Guides
Do you come here, and today?
Industry Guides
You work a route rather than a service area, most of your work comes from barns and vets, and the site's job is.
Industry Guides
Reach and capacity. Then everything else.
Industry Guides
They will find you. Can they book?
Industry Guides
The portfolio is the site.
Industry Guides
Your customers are roofers checking whether you have four squares of a specific shingle before they drive across town.
Domains
Ten minutes. Once a year.
Domains
It does not touch your site.
Technical
Mail moved. Records did not.
Technical
You left. The record did not.
Technical
You made the change an hour ago, it works on your phone and not on your computer, and nobody has done anything wrong.
Security
Covers what it names. Nothing else.
Domains
Decide it. Do not drift into it.
Domains
Most are worth nothing. Some are not.
Domains
Four minutes. Stop paying for nothing.
Domains
Almost nobody types it at all.
Domains
Alarming. Usually nothing.
Domains
Ask badly and the price triples.
Domains
It had a life before you.
Domains
Hides the address. Not the ownership.
Domains
The registrant field is the closest thing a domain has to a name on a title, and on a great many small business domai.
Domains
One setting. Free. Check yours.
Domains
Their name. Your domain. Fixable.
Domains
Three accounts. One reason: history.
Domains
One card. Eleven silent failures.
Domains
Name them all. Most people cannot.
Accessibility
Keep the log. It becomes the statement.
Accessibility
Blocked first. Cheap second.
Accessibility
One hour. One person. Everything.
Accessibility
Mouse away. Complete the journey.
Accessibility
Press control and plus. Twice.
Accessibility
Legible here. Invisible there.
Accessibility
Your brand colour fails. Three options.
Accessibility
The 10% it misses is the 10% that matters.
Accessibility
Twenty minutes away. Everything gone.
Accessibility
A red border round a field tells somebody that something is wrong and not what, which is where a good proportion of a.
Accessibility
Fourteen presses before the content.
Accessibility
One line. Whole site unusable.
Accessibility
Announced as a table. It is not one.
Accessibility
It should have been a page.
Accessibility
Back does nothing. Now what?
Accessibility
Read the headings alone. Do they work?
Accessibility
Your name is a picture. Fix it.
Accessibility
Say nothing. Deliberately.
Accessibility
Describe the job, not the picture.
Accessibility
160 images. One afternoon.
Accessibility
Turn the screen off. Then try.
Accessibility
They left. You never heard.
Local Marketing
Quiet season. Do not discount yet.
Social Media
Run the export before you need it.
Social Media
Two years. No evidence. Stop.
Social Media
Four posts. One afternoon.
Web Design
Find every one. There are more than you think.
Social Media
The logo changed this morning, the name went with it, and for a small business account almost nothing has actually ch.
Social Media
The material makes itself.
Social Media
Six enquiries. Now work out why.
Social Media
Four sentences that actually answer what somebody asked will do more for you than any advertisement, and most trades.
Social Media
The page has 40. The group has 4,000.
Social Media
800 followers. 40 saw it.
Analytics
No enquiries. Not the same as nothing.
Social Media
A customer cannot see your posting workflow, and they can see the six specific artefacts that reveal a post was writt.
Social Media
Capacity first. Then choose.
Social Media
Just stop. Leave a signpost.
Consulting
Six ways it goes wrong. None is closure.
Social Media
It worked twice. It failed often.
Social Media
Available here. Still probably not for you.
Analytics
Two series. One boundary.
Analytics
The date has passed. Here is what remains.
Branding
Ten minutes now. Expensive later.
Analytics
Two pages. For whoever comes next.
Analytics
Nine reports. Two get read.
Analytics
Not useless. Actively misleading.
Analytics
Four sources. No model will help.
Analytics
One year in your records is unusable.
Analytics
It was always going to be quiet.
Analytics
That average is not about you.
Analytics
What will you do if it moves?
Analytics
Be told, rather than checking.
Analytics
One number. Everything else optional.
Analytics
Ninety taps. Forty calls.
Hosting
Recorded all along. Never opened.
Analytics
Forty visits. No conclusions available.
Analytics
Say it in June, not in August.
Analytics
Four genuinely gone. The rest moved.
Analytics
Both running. Both different.
Analytics
Visits yes. Conversions no.
Analytics
It exists. Is it collecting?
Analytics
Thirty-six rows. Eight columns.
Analytics
You can save answers, not questions.
Analytics
Four years of figures are about to become a read-only archive with an expiry date on it, and the useful parts fit on.
Analytics
Thirty days. Four things to do.
Web Design
Build for the version you cannot predict.
Consulting
Eight things you can stop watching.
Consulting
Shorter horizons. Reversible bets.
Consulting
The decision is the same as it was.
Consulting
No announcement affects this one.
Email Marketing
Nobody can change the rules on this.
Search
One channel is one decision away.
Reputation
The one thing nobody can produce for you.
Content
Anyone can generate a kitchen now.
Content
Five shapes, not one instruction.
Conversion
Not ready to hire. Ready to ask.
Analytics
Split it now, not after it falls.
Consulting
Five announcements. Nothing to do.
Search
Real, uneven, smaller than feared.
Search
An answer above the results. Not here yet.
Content
One page trying to explain something and persuade somebody at the same time usually does neither, and the two jobs wa.
Local Marketing
You fixed it. It came back.
Reputation
Ask it about you. Read carefully.
Search
Anything assembling an answer about local suppliers has to decide which businesses to name, and it does that from wha.
Search
Nobody can answer this without you.
Search
One answer. No click needed.
Content
It has to work on its own.
Search
Monthly, quarterly, and twice a year.
Search
Your photos can be found separately.
Technical
Four apply. Two are visible.
Search
Being in the index means it is eligible to appear, which is a much lower bar than appearing, and the two get treated.
Search
Most of those are not errors.
Technical
Nine hundred pages. You wrote forty.
Search
Good traffic. Wrong customers.
Technical
Point it somewhere close, or lose it.
Search
Does it have readers, or just listings?
Search
Publish the thing people cite.
Search
Not penalised. Just ignored.
Search
Eleven pages. All of them good.
Search
First for your name. Found by nobody new.
Search
They asked a full question.
Search
Four thousand searches. No customers.
Search
You do not have a ranking for a local search, you have a map of rankings, and where you sit on it changes with every.
Search
Lost the visits. Kept the work.
Search
Check the boring causes first.
Search
The one that mattered got no coverage.
Consulting
You tried it on eleven things in February.
Consulting
The slowness was the thinking.
Consulting
Twice a month. Fifteen dollars a go.
Consulting
They are using it. Nobody said anything.
Search
Forty new pages. Nine worse ones.
Search
They published a position. Read it.
Consulting
It is all in your invoices already.
Content
Twenty ideas. Nineteen useless.
Consulting
Google's arrived. Not here yet.
Compliance
Fluent, and possibly wrong.
Consulting
The answer is on the page in front of you.
Consulting
Faster, and they can tell.
Conversion
It answered. You are bound by it.
Consulting
Better at nearly everything. Still makes things up.
Consulting
Nobody discloses which word processor they used, and a client who discovers you generated the whole deliverable after.
Compliance
You pasted their email. Where did it go?
Consulting
Test it where you can mark the answer.
Content
Grammar was fine. Voice was the problem.
Content
Everyone got the same tool.
Ecommerce
Two hundred products. Nobody was going to write them.
Compliance
Confident, fluent, and about another country.
Content
The invented detail is not the problem.
Content
Supply the substance. Ask for the shape.
Performance
Three numbers. Checked in two minutes.
Performance
Diagnose the site, not the person.
Performance
A percentage of forty is not much.
Performance
The score went from fifty-one to eighty-nine, the invoice was paid, and the enquiries stayed exactly where they were.
Performance
Not slow. Just far away, repeatedly.
Performance
Downloaded fast. Still not usable.
Performance
Edited quarterly. Rebuilt hourly.
Performance
Unchanged since 2021. Rebuilt every visit.
Hosting
One setting. Three quarters smaller.
Performance
Fast the second time. Nobody came twice.
Performance
Agreed it should go. Still there.
Performance
Six tags. Nobody approved six.
Performance
Ten files. One after another.
Performance
The text is there. You cannot see it.
Performance
A third smaller. Same picture.
Performance
Four hundred pixels shown. Two thousand sent.
Performance
You tested the one page that was fine.
Performance
Tested from a data centre. Used in a car park.
Performance
Nobody made the site slow.
Web Design
Three pictures. A hundred decisions.
Web Design
Everybody agrees. Nobody does it.
Web Design
Same theme. Same demo photos. Same site.
Web Design
You copied the layout. Not the reason.
Web Design
A search box on twelve pages.
Web Design
Nine pages. No trail needed.
Web Design
Fourteen items, all of them needed.
Web Design
Right with three. Wrong with thirty.
Web Design
They printed it. It came out wrong.
Web Design
Four button styles. Nobody chose four.
Web Design
Five words, a menu, and a button. One row.
Web Design
Same layout. A third more text.
Web Design
The page with no search results, the basket with nothing in it, and the listing with no reviews yet are all pages som.
Web Design
It fades in. They already scrolled past.
Web Design
Looks striking. Harder to read.
Web Design
Eleven fields. Decision made.
Web Design
Is that a button or a heading?
Web Design
Always visible. Always in the way.
Web Design
Big picture. Nothing else on screen.
Web Design
Three columns, one hundred pixels each.
Web Design
The layout demanded photos. Stock arrived.
Web Design
It looks old. It also works.
Consulting
Close it properly and go.
Analytics
Twelve numbers, none watched. Pick one.
Content
Decide the shots now. Take them all year.
Consulting
Nine tasks. Do the first three.
Consulting
The list only ever grows.
Consulting
Decide it now or quote it all year.
Consulting
This week, they want to clear it too.
Consulting
You reopen on the third. They do not.
Reputation
The rota is easy. The diversion is not.
Security
One hour. Once a year. Now.
Domains
One of these takes the site down.
Analytics
Your best channel is not in any report.
Content
Two worked. Fourteen did not.
Search
Far enough away to read it honestly.
Analytics
July is the deadline. December is the date that matters.
Consulting
Drafting yes. Deciding no.
Consulting
The good parts are all in your records.
Consulting
Every error arrives in the same register as every correct answer, which removes the signal people have always used to.
Content
It produces the average. That is the design.
Content
Thirty seconds. Competent. Unusable.
Consulting
Released Wednesday. Everywhere by Friday.
Technical
Three changes. One needs your attention.
Consulting
Decide it now. December will not let you.
Reputation
Thank you. Here is ten per cent off. Not the same thing.
Reputation
Nine complaints. Two hours. Sort them.
Reputation
Everybody else is closed. That is the opportunity.
Reputation
Thank you for your message, we will respond as soon as possible.
Reputation
Reduced is fine. Unannounced is not.
Compliance
Evidence, not argument. And a deadline.
Security
They wait until you are busy.
Ecommerce
Best week of the year. Money held until March.
Ecommerce
No order, no message, no record.
Compliance
They paid you. Then the courier asked for more.
Compliance
You took the money. Now the date matters.
Ecommerce
Your busiest page. Selling nothing.
Ecommerce
Different name on the parcel. Different everything.
Ecommerce
Bought in November. Opened in December.
Ecommerce
Higher uptake than you think. More work than you think.
Ecommerce
Not a discount with extra steps.
Ecommerce
They know when your sale is. They are waiting.
Ecommerce
One step breaks. Everything queues behind it.
Ecommerce
The order that arrives at midnight.
Ecommerce
What is in the room is what you are selling.
Analytics
It went up. That might be bad.
Conversion
Put it back. Nobody will mind.
Conversion
Before and after, honestly.
Conversion
Forty seconds, or a play button they ignore.
Conversion
Longer worked. Here is why.
Conversion
Fourteen adverts. One page. No match.
Conversion
Fewer exits. Also fewer ways to check you are real.
Conversion
Not every enquiry is worth a quote.
Conversion
First reasonable quote wins more than the best one.
Conversion
They did not decide against you. They forgot.
Conversion
Maximum attention. Minimum content.
Conversion
Fires as they leave. Catches almost nobody.
Conversion
They land, they read, they go somewhere. Where?
Conversion
They will not type it. They will take a call.
Conversion
It says we are online. You are on a roof.
Conversion
Nobody has ever checked a footer badge.
Conversion
Great service, highly recommended, would use again.
Conversion
Every job is different. Publish the range anyway.
Conversion
Explains everything. Asks for nothing.
Conversion
They started typing. Then they stopped.
Security
One page. Written on a quiet Tuesday.
Security
The fear is justified. Do it anyway, in order.
Security
The answer is on your own website.
Security
Faster today. Unfixable later.
Security
Nine hundred accounts. You made two of them.
Security
Every other account resets through this one.
Security
The back door you set up years ago.
Security
Generated once. Needed exactly when you cannot find them.
Security
They are not being difficult. Answer the objection.
Security
They told you. That is the good outcome.
Compliance
Nobody decided to keep them. They are there anyway.
Security
Probably not you. Check anyway.
Security
A red page where your site used to be.
Security
It looks fine to you. That is the design.
Security
Nothing tells you a plugin has been abandoned.
Security
Which copy, and what do you lose.
Security
Your backup is inside the thing you are backing up.
Security
One door. Four locks. An afternoon.
Security
Check who has been logging in as you.
Security
They already know the username.
Security
Nobody picked you. Software found you.
Content
It will never be perfect. Publish it.
Content
Built in January. Abandoned in March.
Search
Forty towns, one page, forty times.
Content
Who was this written for? It shows.
Search
Announced last week. Rolling out today.
Content
Three half-answers, competing with each other.
Content
One page, four questions, four half-answers.
Content
Best job you ever did. Cannot mention it.
Content
They will never hire you. Answer anyway.
Content
They picked you. Now what.
Content
Nobody has ever asked that.
Content
They are comparing anyway. Help them.
Content
Promised a guide. Delivered a pitch.
Content
Nothing changed. The date says otherwise.
Content
Anybody can assert it. Show how you know.
Content
Written by nobody, on behalf of everybody.
Search
Delete a third. The rest goes up.
Content
A page that has been improved for four years by adding paragraphs to it is not an improved page.
Content
First result. Wrong page.
Content
Four thin posts a month, or one good one.
Content
Four paragraphs of preamble. No answer.
Content
The details you cannot look up are the whole point.
Teardowns
Seven pages, no animation, one photograph per service, and it does everything the last five teardowns found missing.
Teardowns
The business is trading, busy, and doing well.
Teardowns
Ninety photos. Nobody reaches the tenth.
Teardowns
Four hundred words and nobody in them.
Teardowns
The words exist. They are inside pictures.
Teardowns
No phone number, no address, no names, and a form as the only way in.
Teardowns
Six screens. Most people leave at the third.
Teardowns
Eleven seconds on a phone, and none of it was the hosting.
Teardowns
Nine things to do. So people do none.
Teardowns
Forty pages, each about a different service, each assembled from the same paragraphs with a word swapped.
Industry Guides
What size, what can go in, and can it sit there.
Industry Guides
They are buying reliability, not cleaning.
Industry Guides
How fast, how long, and what if we overrun.
Industry Guides
They are confused. Most broker sites make it worse.
Industry Guides
Owners are buying. Tenants are stuck with you.
Industry Guides
A stump and a subdivision are not the same enquiry.
Industry Guides
They are about to send you thousands. Reassure them.
Industry Guides
You cannot win on catalogue. Do not try.
Industry Guides
Hours, turnaround, and can you do this.
Industry Guides
Months of research before anybody calls.
Branding
Found in a drawer, six months later.
Advertising
It is printed. The page has to outlive it.
Web Design
Somebody shared your link. It looked like nothing.
Web Design
Fifteen tabs. Yours is the blank one.
Branding
Built for one service. Now you offer four.
Branding
A one-page specification works while one person approves everything.
Branding
They booked a website. Somebody unmarked knocked.
Branding
Two seconds, three items. Everything else is decoration.
Branding
Memorability is a different property from clarity, and for a small business the line worth having is the one a custom.
Branding
They heard it. Now they have to type it.
Branding
Photocopy it. If it disappears, so does your brand.
Branding
Brand guidelines run to forty pages and go unread.
Content
The same handshake, on four competitors' sites.
Compliance
Buying a font is not buying a font.
Compliance
You paid for it. You may not own it.
Compliance
Similar name, same town. Now what.
Compliance
Registering a business name is not a trademark, and a single-location business already has rights it did not apply for.
Branding
Nobody is searching for your Platinum Care Plan.
Branding
Smart website, unbranded van, invoice from a template.
Branding
Nobody is seeing the colour you signed off.
Branding
A rebrand for an established local business risks the one asset it has, which is people recognising the name.
Branding
Spend the afternoon. Spend the money elsewhere.
Reputation
One review at four reviews is a crisis. At ninety it is nothing.
Compliance
Showing your best five is normal. Implying it is all of them is not.
Compliance
The easiest reviews to get are the ones that count against you.
Reputation
Not a customer. Now prove it to a platform.
Reputation
Reply to all of them, or reply properly. Not both.
Reputation
They meant the other business with your name.
Reputation
One complaint is a conversation. Forty is not.
Reputation
Something published has landed badly, and the three options are to delete it, apologise, or leave it alone.
Social Media
You are handing over your voice, not a task.
Social Media
Two thousand people, none of them buyers.
Social Media
The number goes up. The reach goes down.
Compliance
Skill-testing questions exist for a reason.
Compliance
Tagging does more than name somebody.
Compliance
Sharing is permitted. Reposting is not the same thing.
Social Media
The best content you get, and the riskiest.
Social Media
They messaged you. The app told them you reply quickly.
Social Media
Some comments get worse when you answer them.
Social Media
Every post is an offer. Nobody is reading any of them.
Social Media
One post, four platforms, three of them broken.
Social Media
Most advice about video assumes somebody willing to talk to a phone.
Social Media
Growing fastest is not the same as where your customers are.
Email Marketing
Exporting a list and importing it elsewhere takes ten minutes.
Email Marketing
Everybody opens it. Nobody at your business has read it.
Email Marketing
Open rates rose across almost every list last autumn without anybody sending better email.
Email Marketing
You have no news. Nobody wanted news.
Email Marketing
An automated message that references what somebody did, too precisely and too quickly, reads as surveillance.
Email Marketing
It is not a technical decision. It is an unwatched inbox.
Email Marketing
A tabbed inbox sorting your message into promotions is not a spam filter and not a failure.
Email Marketing
A steady trickle is healthy. Zero is not.
Email Marketing
Tuesday at ten is somebody else's average.
Email Marketing
A message asking for four things gets none of them done.
Email Marketing
Some readers see empty boxes where your message was.
Email Marketing
View this email in your browser. That is your second line.
Email Marketing
The subject line is the whole of the decision.
Email Marketing
The most-opened message you will ever send. If you send it.
Email Marketing
Segmentation is standard advice and it assumes a list large enough for the pieces to be worth having.
Email Marketing
An old list is not a dormant asset waiting to be woken.
Technical
Your neighbours' spam is your spam folder.
Technical
Three records sit in your domain settings and each stops a different thing.
Technical
It builds over months and it drops in a day.
Email Marketing
Most small businesses do not send spam deliberately.
Analytics
Rebuilds break tracking. Plan the handover.
Analytics
Every figure you track costs something to collect, read, and explain.
Analytics
What changed around then? Nobody remembers.
Analytics
Most dashboards are built to demonstrate that measurement is happening.
Analytics
A figure falls, somebody asks why, and the honest answer is that the measurement changed rather than the business.
Analytics
Everybody who declines becomes invisible to you.
Analytics
A new property arrives configured to collect more about people than a small business needs.
Analytics
Two tools on the same site will never report the same numbers, and the gap between them is not a fault in either.
Analytics
Traffic rises sharply, nothing was published, no campaign ran, and enquiries are unchanged.
Analytics
At fifty a day, a twenty percent change is weather.
Analytics
There is one date in the announcement and three deadlines in practice.
Analytics
The announcement today gives a firm date for the first time.
Analytics
A migration is the rare moment when carrying something forward requires a decision.
Analytics
They liked the old report. Change the tool, not the report.
Analytics
A default nobody chose is deleting your history.
Analytics
Analytics knows what people did after they arrived.
Analytics
You are the biggest visitor to your own website.
Analytics
Traffic without conversions is a headcount, not a measurement.
Analytics
The metric everybody quoted and few could define has been replaced by one that measures the opposite.
Analytics
The report you opened every month is not in the new interface under that name, and frequently not under any name.
Analytics
The old system let you declare that reaching a particular page counted as a success.
Analytics
The two analytics systems are separate products that do not share data.
Analytics
Plenty of businesses set the second property up a year ago and have never opened it.
Technical
No staging, no team. Still need a routine.
Performance
A good optimisation, applied to the wrong image.
Performance
A page can request fonts from a font service, from the theme, and from a plugin, all at once.
Performance
The same page tested twice gives two quite different results, and the gap is not a fault.
Search
It is rolling out to desktop now. Most sites will not notice.
Performance
Two visits, one visitor. Something is firing twice.
Technical
Page two of a listing is where content goes to be forgotten.
Technical
Six filters, thousands of addresses, forty products.
Technical
One slash, two addresses, one page.
Technical
Setting up a redirect prevents the problem.
Security
The renewal succeeded, the dashboard says valid, and visitors are seeing a security warning.
Security
A secure certificate covers the connection.
Technical
It works when you check. That is the whole problem.
Technical
Reports list dozens of missing pages, most from links on sites you do not control.
Technical
Structured data describes your business to a machine in a format it does not have to interpret.
Technical
A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the real one.
Technical
One line, one file, and the whole site disappears.
Technical
A sitemap is a list of the pages you want found.
Technical
One address sends you to a second, which sends you to a third, which finally serves the page.
Domains
The domain is yours, the business is trading, and nobody can get into the account that holds it.
Domains
A lapsed domain does not simply stop working.
Domains
Securing the domain early is sensible.
Domains
It looks fine written down. Now say it to somebody.
Domains
The promotion ended eighteen months ago and the domain is still renewing.
Domains
Two domains, one site. Redirect, do not duplicate.
Hosting
Managed hosting means the server is looked after.
Hosting
Recurring revenue, and somebody else's outage is now yours.
Hosting
The same problem described two ways produces a fix in an hour or a week of back and forth.
Hosting
An email arrives saying your hosting company has joined a larger group, and that nothing will change.
Hosting
The outage is avoidable. Change one setting a week early.
Hosting
Scheduled tasks run on your server every day, doing things nobody currently at the business chose.
Hosting
A page returns a forbidden error, nothing has changed, and the file is plainly there.
Hosting
Your pages are not files. That explains most of the odd behaviour.
Hosting
Two copies solves one problem and creates another.
Hosting
The distance costs milliseconds. Something else costs more.
Hosting
Finding out from a customer that your site is down is both embarrassing and slow.
Hosting
An outage happened, the host says it is resolved, and the explanation is four words long.
Hosting
A bandwidth limit is rarely reached by visitors.
Hosting
A warning arrives saying the account is nearly full, and nobody has added anything for months.
Hosting
Most business owners log into their hosting twice a year and find a screen of icons they do not recognise.
Technical
An hour of small things, and the site stops looking neglected.
Web Design
You cannot see your own site, because you know what every page means before you read it.
Search
They passed you. Find out what changed before assuming a budget.
Consulting
You will be wrong. Build a budget that survives being wrong.
Consulting
A list of fifteen improvements produces none of them.
Consulting
Not everything worth wanting has a number attached.
Consulting
An honest retrospective is uncomfortable and short.
Hosting
Nobody is watching for two weeks. Check the four things that fail.
Reputation
A briefing gets somebody through a busy fortnight.
Consulting
It is obvious to you. That is why nobody has written it down.
Content
You cannot photograph a summer job in February.
Hosting
Knowing a backup exists is not the same as knowing how long recovery takes or who could do it.
Domains
Everything expires in Q1 and January is when nobody is looking.
Security
Access is granted whenever somebody needs something and removed almost never.
Consulting
The hard part is not reviewing the list.
Consulting
You already know which one. The question is what it costs to stay.
Consulting
Costs have moved considerably over two years and most small business prices have not.
Consulting
Every business has a few, and most treat them as bad luck.
Consulting
A year of declined enquiries is a description of how the market sees you, written by people with no reason to flatter.
Content
An annual review is not the same as finding dead pages.
Analytics
Monthly reporting produces noise and anxiety.
Search
A search update is announced, the coverage is dramatic, and most small businesses see nothing.
Technical
Three real shifts this year, and two renames that changed nothing.
Consulting
December has about fifteen working days in it and roughly the usual amount of work.
Advertising
You cannot outbid them. You can go where they are not.
Ecommerce
Twenty percent off can be half your profit. Work it out first.
Ecommerce
It all comes back in January. Decide the rules in November.
Reputation
In a busy season the phone gets answered by whoever is nearest, and that person has never been told what to say.
Conversion
A seasonal surge is not a hiring problem for most small businesses.
Ecommerce
Your cutoff date rests on a courier's published guidance, which is guidance rather than a guarantee.
Ecommerce
Gift cards are the December product with no stock, no shipping, and no deadline, which makes them unusually attractive.
Ecommerce
Working out the dates is the easy half.
Ecommerce
Publish the cutoff dates now. Everything else follows from them.
Local Marketing
Two months shut. Neither option is clean.
Local Marketing
You changed the door sign. The listing still says half past five.
Local Marketing
Ignore the view count. Two other numbers are worth ten minutes.
Local Marketing
Book from the search result. Only if the calendar is real.
Local Marketing
Switch it on only if somebody will answer it.
Local Marketing
Two separate sections that display differently and do different jobs, and most businesses have filled in neither.
Local Marketing
Twenty checkboxes, ten minutes, and most businesses have set none.
Local Marketing
Somebody changed your hours. It was not anybody who works for you.
Local Marketing
Making the change is the easy part.
Local Marketing
The settings have not disappeared, they have moved to where the listing appears.
Local Marketing
Google My Business is becoming Google Business Profile, and the more consequential part is not the name.
Advertising
The mechanics are learnable. The weekly attention is the real cost.
Social Media
The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp announced today that it is renaming itself Meta.
Analytics
A monthly report arrives full of numbers that are going up, and the business cannot tell whether anything is working.
Analytics
Enquiries do not fall to zero, which surprises people, and they do not stay level either.
Advertising
Full diary, obvious economy, and three better options first.
Advertising
Advertising started when a season begins arrives after the decisions have been made.
Advertising
One van, one job a day. That should shape the whole campaign.
Advertising
Some businesses solve a problem people do not know they have, or do not know can be solved.
Advertising
Businesses spend months testing formats, placements and audiences while the thing being proposed stays the same.
Advertising
The phone in your pocket is the right camera for this.
Advertising
Too small to optimise. Big enough to find out if anybody cares.
Conversion
Sending advertising traffic to a homepage asks somebody to find what they were promised.
Advertising
The audience that used to be four thousand is now eight hundred.
Advertising
When the system can no longer find exactly the right person, the advert has to do the sorting.
Advertising
Six months on, here is what actually changed for small advertisers.
Advertising
The boost button is the same auction with almost every control removed, which makes it convenient and expensive.
Social Media
Posts that used to reach a few thousand people now reach two hundred, and no amount of posting more brings it back.
Social Media
A business account disappears overnight, the appeal is a form, and there is nobody to telephone.
Email Marketing
Followers are borrowed. A list is yours.
Consulting
It works until the rules change. Keep a way to reach people.
Content
Almost nobody visits it, and the few who do are deciding whether to trust you with something.
Security
The useful part of a cyber policy for a four-person firm is usually not the payout.
Compliance
They will judge the letter, not the incident.
Security
The instinct is to work out what happened and who is to blame.
Security
One email, one payment, and the money does not come back.
Compliance
Federal law, three provincial ones, and one question everybody asks.
Compliance
Assented this week. Phased to 2024, and it does not stop at the provincial border.
Security
Somebody can put your business name and address on an email without touching your systems.
Security
Everyone agrees it is a good idea. Week three is where it dies.
Security
Shared folders accumulate permissions the way a garage accumulates boxes.
Security
One setting. It is already on your machine.
Security
Somebody exported the list in 2019. It is still in Downloads.
Compliance
Almost every small business does this without deciding to, because the services they use run on servers elsewhere.
Compliance
A service you use has been compromised and your customer information was in it.
Compliance
You cannot delete everything, and pretending otherwise is the mistake.
Compliance
These requests are rare, arrive without warning, and are almost always straightforward once the panic passes.
Compliance
The default for a small business is to keep everything forever, because nothing forces a decision.
Compliance
Two sentences by the button beats a link nobody opens.
Compliance
A generated policy describes a business that does not exist.
Compliance
Believing somebody agreed is not the same as being able to show it.
Compliance
It is not just the database. Start with the phone in your pocket.
Consulting
The budget ends at launch. The costs do not.
Consulting
Asking somebody independent to look at a proposal you are minded to accept is sensible and easy to do unfairly.
Compliance
Asking a small supplier for evidence of insurance feels awkward and is entirely ordinary.
Consulting
It cost a lot and it has produced nothing. That first fact is irrelevant.
Analytics
Most website return figures are produced by counting revenue the business would have received anyway.
Advertising
Advertising multiplies whatever the site already does, in both directions.
Consulting
Doubling the budget does not double the site.
Consulting
Somebody has stopped replying and is holding work you have paid for.
Consulting
The problem is rarely the hours themselves.
Consulting
The comparison is usually presented as cost against reliability, which is not quite right.
Consulting
Ending an arrangement partway through is sometimes correct and always expensive.
Consulting
Most small website projects that run late are waiting on the client, and the client is usually the last to realise it.
Consulting
Somebody asks for something reasonable that was not quoted.
Compliance
A small project does not warrant a twenty-page agreement, and it does warrant more than an emailed quote.
Compliance
A project ends and the client has a working website and none of the things that would let somebody else work on it.
Consulting
Tie payments to deliverables, not to weeks. That is the whole trick.
Consulting
The lowest quote is usually honest about what it covers and silent about what it does not.
Consulting
Three quotes, five times apart. They are not for the same thing.
Consulting
A retainer described in adjectives is unmeasurable and becomes a subscription nobody can evaluate.
Consulting
Ask what you keep if you stop paying. The answer defines the arrangement.
Consulting
The range is enormous and mostly explicable.
Local Marketing
Shared premises are fine. Identical-looking listings are not.
Local Marketing
Do not create a new listing. Edit the one with the reviews.
Local Marketing
Somebody is nearby, on a phone, deciding now. That search is decided differently.
Local Marketing
Set the holiday hours in advance. It is a field, and it takes two minutes.
Conversion
The phone is where the enquiries are. The number is at the bottom in grey.
Local Marketing
The day demand spikes is the day you cannot change anything.
Local Marketing
Publish it before the season, not during it. Everything takes time to rank.
Search
An afternoon and no subscription tells you most of what a competitor is doing.
Search
Three area pages is a strategy. Forty is a problem.
Local Marketing
Three cities, three pages. The question is what goes in them.
Local Marketing
You do not have to publish your home address to be found locally.
Local Marketing
Paid directory listings were once a reasonable spend and mostly are not now.
Search
Six links from your own town beat a hundred from nowhere in particular.
Local Marketing
Your listing vanished. Here is what to do, and what not to.
Local Marketing
There are two of you on the map. One has the old address.
Local Marketing
Somebody else is answering questions about your business, publicly.
Local Marketing
A free slot in your own search result, and almost nobody uses it.
Local Marketing
Your listing photos are from 2018. Somebody is choosing between you and a competitor on them.
Local Marketing
Reviews affect where you appear and whether anybody chooses you, and the second effect is larger.
Local Marketing
Three slots, most of the calls. Different rules from ordinary results.
Local Marketing
A service area business can tell Google where it works, and that declaration does far less than most owners expect.
Accessibility
The supplier built it, you publish it, and a plugin author wrote part of it.
Accessibility
What you can fix in an hour, a day, and a week. In that order.
Accessibility
Arguing for accessibility on moral grounds alone tends to produce agreement and no budget.
Accessibility
Some people get motion sick from your homepage. They have already told their phone.
Accessibility
A form is where an accessibility failure stops being an inconvenience and becomes a lost enquiry.
Accessibility
One number, checked in a browser, settles the argument.
Accessibility
A scanned document uploaded as a PDF is a photograph of text.
Accessibility
Captions take twenty minutes per video and most people watching are using them.
Compliance
Most small businesses are not directly covered by the new provincial framework.
Compliance
Legislation received royal assent this month establishing a framework for accessibility in the province.
Search
The honest answer for a typical local business is not very much, and saying so is more useful than the alternative.
Search
The change announced last year has begun rolling out, gradually, on mobile search.
Accessibility
Turn it on and listen to your homepage. It is uncomfortable and it works.
Accessibility
One line of code, fully accessible. The users say otherwise.
Accessibility
Accessible is not a requirement. Name the standard and who tests it.
Accessibility
Five problems, one afternoon, most of the failures on an ordinary site.
Accessibility
Say where you actually are, not where you would like to be.
Hosting
A content network is sold as a universal speed improvement.
Hosting
Most slow sites are slow because of what they send, not where they are sent from.
Performance
Site-wide speed figures are averages, and averages hide the one page that takes eleven seconds.
Performance
The advert loads and the page jumps. That one is genuinely hard.
Performance
You do not need a developer for most of this. You need three settings and smaller images.
Ecommerce
A discount is a short-term sale and a long-term lesson.
Ecommerce
Every catalogue carries lines that have not sold in a year.
Ecommerce
Product reviews accumulate on their own at high volume and never at low volume.
Content
Two hundred shops, one description. None of them ranks.
Content
Fifty products in a day is a setup problem, not a photography problem.
Ecommerce
Comparing a marketplace commission with your own payment processing is comparing two different things.
Ecommerce
A marketplace brings buyers you could not reach and keeps the relationship with them.
Ecommerce
A lost parcel is a customer problem, a carrier problem and a money problem, and they need handling in that order.
Ecommerce
Published rates are the least useful basis for choosing a carrier.
Ecommerce
Ten orders a day does not need a warehouse. It needs a routine.
Ecommerce
A damaged parcel costs the sale, the shipping, and the review.
Ecommerce
Showing prices in a customer's currency removes a real barrier and introduces several new ones.
Compliance
An order to another province may not carry the tax you are used to charging.
Ecommerce
Making people register before they pay costs sales. There is a way to have both.
Ecommerce
Most people who add something to a basket do not buy it, and that is normal rather than a fault.
Ecommerce
Once a catalogue outgrows its menu, internal search becomes the main way people find things.
Ecommerce
The page between your menu and your products is doing more work than either.
Ecommerce
One product with six options, or six products? The answer changes everything.
Ecommerce
Ten products and two hundred are different businesses, not different sizes.
Ecommerce
Selling online is an operational commitment rather than a website feature.
Conversion
Ten people, one task each. You will find more than analytics ever showed you.
Analytics
A heatmap is a persuasive picture that answers a narrower question than it appears to.
Conversion
Every project has the meeting about whether the button should be orange.
Conversion
Most small sites do not have enough visitors to detect the differences they are trying to measure.
Conversion
Three changes, one result, no idea which caused it.
Analytics
Record where you started. In six months nobody will agree what it was.
Analytics
Most monthly marketing reports are long because length signals effort.
Analytics
Numbers rarely lie outright.
Analytics
Attribution models were built for companies running many channels at scale.
Consulting
Four words, asked at the right moment, produce better marketing information than most analytics accounts.
Analytics
Your best marketing produces phone calls, which your analytics cannot see at all.
Analytics
You already have the numbers. They are not in your analytics.
Analytics
Consent requirements and browser restrictions have made cookie-based measurement steadily less complete.
Compliance
Somebody has asked what you do with their information.
Compliance
Most cookie banners are decorative: everything loads before anybody clicks, and declining changes nothing.
Compliance
It is still collecting. You stopped advertising two years ago.
Email Marketing
Sign up for our newsletter offers nothing and collects almost nobody.
Analytics
Every business already holds more useful information about its customers than any advertising platform can supply.
Advertising
Narrow targeting and tight optimisation depended on signals that are becoming scarce.
Advertising
Your platform reports forty conversions, your analytics says twenty-six, and you took thirty-one orders.
Advertising
A permission prompt is arriving on iPhones within weeks, and much of its effect has already landed.
Performance
Resizing an image and compressing it are two different jobs.
Hosting
Caching is why your site is fast and why the change you just made is not showing.
Technical
If the scripts fail, does your phone number still appear?
Performance
Your site loads code from servers you have never heard of. Count them.
Performance
A visitor judges your site on what appears in the top of the window within the first couple of seconds.
Performance
You go to tap a link, the page shifts, and you tap something else.
Performance
Google has settled on three specific measurements taken from real visitors rather than from a test.
Performance
The browser has your page and is showing a blank screen. Here is why.
Performance
Speed tests run from a data centre on a fast connection.
Web Design
Trade customers use your site standing up, one-handed, in poor light, with dirty hands and gloves on.
Accessibility
It looks elegant on your monitor. It is unreadable at arm's length.
Performance
A background video on your homepage is spending your visitor's money before they have decided whether to stay.
Web Design
An embedded map covering the width of a phone screen catches the swipe meant for the page.
Conversion
Making the number tappable is the easy half.
Conversion
Every field you add is typed with one thumb by somebody who is moving.
Conversion
An overlay that covers a quarter of a desktop screen covers all of a phone.
Web Design
Price lists, specifications, and comparison charts were designed for paper and desktop screens.
Web Design
Phones grew and the controls stayed where they were.
Web Design
Light grey text on white looks refined on a monitor in an office.
Web Design
A link sized for a mouse pointer is a link most people will miss with a thumb.
Web Design
Narrowing a desktop browser window shows you the layout and hides everything else.
Web Design
Yesterday's question was what a search engine can no longer see.
Search
From this month the mobile version of your site is the one being indexed and ranked.
Content
Same article, three places. Which one gets the credit?
Compliance
Using a passage, a statistic, or an image from someone else is normal and usually fine.
Content
Readers rarely think a page was ghostwritten.
Content
Most outsourced content disappoints because of the brief rather than the writer.
Content
Your reader knows the subject. Simplifying is the wrong instinct.
Content
A page can be your most visited and produce nothing, which is not a failure of the page.
Search
Internal links are the one part of search you control completely, cost nothing, and can add while writing.
Search
Your own pages are competing with each other, and the wrong one is winning.
Content
An existing page has history a new one has to earn from nothing.
Content
Publishing beyond what you actually know is how businesses lose credibility with the people best placed to hire them.
Content
The headline earns the click and the first sentence earns everything after it.
Content
A headline has one job: tell somebody accurately whether the page is for them.
Content
Almost every first draft contains about twice as many words as the finished piece needs.
Content
The January commitment to publish every week is the most reliably broken promise in small business marketing.
Content
Word count is the wrong unit.
Content
Your best evidence is the work you have already done, and most of it cannot be published as it stands.
Content
There is one question you have answered several hundred times.
Content
Running out of ideas is the usual reason publishing stops.
Content
Most small business blogs are abandoned within four months, having produced nothing.
Technical
The old site gets deleted a few weeks after launch, usually to stop paying for the hosting.
Analytics
The fortnight after a launch produces a great deal of data and very little meaning.
Technical
The faults that appear in the first hour of a new site are remarkably consistent between projects.
Reputation
Most rebuilds need no announcement at all.
Search
A small dip after a rebuild is normal and recovers.
Technical
A development copy of your site, left open, becomes a second version of your business competing with the real one.
Search
Most search losses after a rebuild trace to one document that was never written properly.
Web Design
A rebuild is the one moment you can drop content without anybody objecting.
Technical
The page addresses on your current site are an asset somebody else built for you over years.
Web Design
Most sites that get rebuilt should have been repaired, and a few that get patched for years should have been replaced.
Content
Not whether the words are accurate, but whether a stranger reading them arrives at the right answer.
Local Marketing
Your phone number and address appear in more places than you remember, and they stopped matching some time ago.
Content
Your website describes the company you were when it was written.
Technical
Add-ons get the blame for most website trouble, but the theme sits underneath all of them.
Performance
The single most common reason a small business site is slow is photographs uploaded exactly as they came off the phone.
Conversion
A broken form is the only website fault that costs you money while looking perfect.
Technical
Broken links do not announce themselves. One afternoon finds all of them.
Technical
There is one add-on on your site that you leave alone because the last update broke something.
Content
Most sites carry pages that have not been read since they were published.
Web Design
You have taken over a website somebody else built.
Compliance
A page copied from another business, naming tools you do not use and a company that is not yours.
Compliance
No shop, no accounts, no payments, and a template full of clauses about refunds and shipping.
Compliance
The job looks excellent and the photograph is somebody's home.
Compliance
Your words, their site, your town's name swapped out.
Security
Expired at 2am Sunday. Every visitor sees a warning.
Domains
A second extension costs a few dollars a year and prevents somebody else from trading under your name.
Domains
Two separate registrations, in two separate systems, neither of which knows about the other.
Branding
Quality you can trust. So does everybody else.
Branding
You call it a comprehensive drainage assessment.
Content
Still on the website, still ranking, still producing enquiries you have to decline.
Local Marketing
Two places, one website, and a decision nobody makes deliberately.
Consulting
Two weeks with no site work and nobody to quote for.
Consulting
Closed for two weeks. The form kept taking enquiries.
Consulting
Three things to do, in order, with dates.
Consulting
The supplier who let you down, the quote that was too low, the job that went well for a reason.
Content
Four hundred photographs. Three stock images on the site.
Content
A service you stopped offering, an event from 2018, and three pages nobody has visited in two years.
Consulting
Twelve months in. What did it actually bring in?
Consulting
Six charges in January. None of them decided this decade.
Technical
A form that stopped sending, a certificate that expired on a Sunday, and a plugin update that removed the phone number.
Technical
Built by somebody who has moved on, in a system nobody supports, with a login nobody has.
Technical
Adobe's support ends at the end of this month, and for most of your visitors it stopped working over a year ago.
Social Media
A legitimate conclusion, reached deliberately, rather than a failure to keep up.
Social Media
Scheduling makes posting sustainable and makes it possible to publish something tone-deaf during a local emergency.
Social Media
Platforms would rather people stayed, and every post asking somebody to leave is working against that.
Social Media
A square crop, shot close, that looks excellent in a feed and useless on a website.
Social Media
Eleven hundred followers, most of them in another country, acquired through a competition.
Social Media
A comment on your page, visible to everybody, and the reply is being read by people who will never comment.
Social Media
It works fine until you want to sell the business.
Social Media
A quiet fortnight, no finished jobs worth photographing, and posting day arrives anyway.
Social Media
Every abandoned business page has the same shape: three posts in one week, then nothing.
Social Media
Five profiles, three of them last updated in 2018, and none of them doing anything.
Advertising
The report shows clicks. The business gets phone calls.
Advertising
Twenty dollars to boost a post, four thousand people reached, eleven likes and no enquiries.
Advertising
Somebody hears the advertisement, remembers half of it, and searches for whatever they retained.
Advertising
Campaigns run for years because stopping requires a decision and continuing does not.
Advertising
Advertising works, enquiries arrive, and you are already booked for eleven weeks.
Advertising
Clicks from the wrong towns, the wrong searches, and people looking for a job rather than a service.
Advertising
Paying for clicks from people searching for you, who would have found you anyway.
Advertising
Same words, same auction, different price. The page decides.
Advertising
Two hundred a month, spread across four campaigns, producing eleven clicks a week.
Advertising
Paid advertising sends people to a site that is already working, faster.
Analytics
Enquiries went from six to nine.
Analytics
Set the number before the change rather than after.
Analytics
Fourteen charts, updated live, sent monthly, and last viewed in March.
Analytics
Five extra characters and the source is no longer a mystery.
Analytics
The website produced four. The business got eleven.
Analytics
Inherited from an agency, configured by somebody who left, and reporting numbers nobody has verified.
Analytics
It starts collecting the day you turn it on. Not before.
Analytics
A pageview counts that somebody arrived.
Analytics
Two tags on the same pages, collecting into two properties, reporting different numbers.
Analytics
A new version, announced last week. The old one still works.
Web Design
The brochure took months and cost real money, so it goes on the site as a PDF.
Web Design
People scroll to the bottom on purpose. Put something there.
Web Design
One page structure, filled nine times, without producing nine near-identical pages that say nothing.
Web Design
Approved with placeholder text, built, and then the real words arrive and do not fit.
Web Design
Three horizontal lines, a floppy disk, a magnifying glass and a shape that means nothing to anybody.
Branding
Chosen on a screen, printed on vinyl, and it is a different colour.
Branding
One for headings, one for text, and no more.
Web Design
Every gap fills with something because empty looks like an opportunity.
Web Design
Designed with a four-letter placeholder and filled with a twenty-eight-character trading name.
Web Design
Fourteen items across the top, four of which nobody has clicked since 2018.
Web Design
Everything important above the fold, on a page with no fold, viewed on screens ranging from a phone to a monitor.
Accessibility
Not a small group of other people.
Accessibility
Not an audit, not a report, and not a consultant.
Accessibility
Somebody navigating by link hears: read more, read more, read more, click here, read more.
Accessibility
Watched with the sound off by most people who watch it at all, and unavailable entirely to anybody who cannot hear it.
Accessibility
A heading tag chosen because the text needed to be bigger.
Accessibility
Eight empty boxes and no idea what they wanted.
Accessibility
A twelve-pixel close icon in the corner of a popup, tapped by a thumb that covers forty pixels.
Accessibility
Red for unavailable, green for in stock, and nothing else to distinguish them.
Accessibility
Put the mouse down and press tab.
Accessibility
Grey on white, at eleven pixels, in a light weight.
Reputation
A customer demands you remove a review you did not write and cannot remove, or a supplier asks you to take yours down.
Reputation
Four point seven from twelve, and four point seven from three hundred, are not the same claim.
Reputation
Somebody unhappy has written to you rather than posting publicly.
Reputation
Twelve years trading, hundreds of satisfied customers, and an empty listing.
Reputation
Quoted accurately, attributed properly, and linked to the source.
Reputation
Nobody visits the review page. They read four lines in the results.
Reputation
A one-star review from somebody who was never a customer.
Compliance
For some professions, a five-star review is a compliance problem.
Reputation
Thank you for your kind words, forty times, identically.
Reputation
One star, partly unfair, and visible to everybody.
Reputation
Most businesses never ask, and most who do ask at the wrong moment.
Analytics
Somebody saw the van in a driveway, searched the name three weeks later, and phoned.
Analytics
Not a dashboard with fourteen charts.
Analytics
August was down eighteen percent on July.
Analytics
Crawlers, monitoring services, scrapers and your own visits.
Analytics
Traffic is the number analytics gives you for free.
Analytics
Every visit ends somewhere, so a high exit rate is not a fault by itself.
Analytics
Direct, organic, referral and social.
Analytics
Four hundred users, six hundred sessions, and nine hundred page views.
Analytics
Analytics reports hundreds of figures and four of them matter to a small business.
Analytics
Measure what you need. Say that you are doing it. Keep it proportionate.
Search
Listing changes in days, new pages in months, and a competitive position in a year.
Search
They are not better at your trade.
Search
Free, takes fifteen minutes, and reports what actually happened in search rather than what you assume.
Search
A services page listing nine things cannot rank for any of them.
Search
Customers do not search using your trade's vocabulary.
Search
You appear first every time, on your own computer, in your own town.
Search
It looks fine in a browser and does not exist as far as search is concerned.
Search
Sitemaps, internal links and a submission tool.
Search
Yours says Home. The one below it says what it does.
Search
Find the page, fetch it, read it, decide it is worth keeping, and then rank it.
Teardowns
Five pages, no animation, built by somebody who is not a designer.
Teardowns
Four years old, technically fine, and invisible in search.
Teardowns
It submits, it says thank you, and nothing arrives.
Teardowns
Twelve years of work, and a single stock image of a house nobody built.
Teardowns
The price list is a picture.
Teardowns
Strategic solutions, transformational outcomes, and a partnership approach.
Teardowns
Contact us for pricing, on every product, on a site selling things anybody could compare elsewhere.
Teardowns
Serving the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas, which could mean four towns or forty.
Teardowns
Phone during office hours, which are the hours the patient is also at work.
Teardowns
The menu is a PDF, the hours are in an image, and the address is in the footer.
Teardowns
A composite of sites I have looked at, walked through as somebody would actually experience it.
Industry Guides
Square footage, dock doors, clear height, certifications. In that order.
Industry Guides
Portfolios by artist, honest pricing, and an answer to the questions people are too embarrassed to ask.
Industry Guides
Shippers wondering whether you are legitimate, and carriers checking whether you pay.
Industry Guides
Shippers want lanes and authority. Drivers want pay and home time.
Industry Guides
Buyers are checking whether you can do a specific process on a specific material to a specific standard.
Industry Guides
Somebody is looking at this at two in the morning, having lost a parent yesterday, and needs to know what to do next.
Industry Guides
Somebody deciding whether to contact a therapist is doing something difficult.
Industry Guides
Servicing, repairs, sales and the question of whether you have one in stock.
Industry Guides
Customers are choosing a material they cannot feel, a price they cannot estimate, and an installer they cannot judge.
Industry Guides
Boarding up tonight, or a quote for six windows in March.
Industry Guides
No heat in February, and a heat pump decision in June. Same site.
Compliance
A breach, a mistaken email, a lost file.
Compliance
You hold more personal information than you think, in more places.
Security
The diary, the quotes, the customer numbers, the email and the codes that unlock everything else.
Security
Customers on the same network as your till, your computer and your files.
Security
That the connection is encrypted.
Security
Not dramatic, not targeted, and not noticed for three weeks.
Security
Updates fix security holes and occasionally break the site.
Security
An employee left in 2018 and can still read the shared inbox.
Security
An invoice from a company you deal with, with updated bank details.
Security
It adds five seconds to a login and removes almost every way somebody gets into your account with a stolen password.
Security
The same password on eleven accounts, written on a card by the till, and shared by everybody.
Email Marketing
Open rates are unreliable, click rates measure curiosity, and neither tells you whether any of it produced work.
Email Marketing
Six hundred addresses collected over four years and nothing sent since 2018.
Email Marketing
There is no correct interval.
Email Marketing
Four messages, written once, sent automatically at the right moment.
Technical
Printed on the van. Owned by somebody else.
Email Marketing
Hiding it does not keep anybody.
Email Marketing
A reply is worth more than an open and more than a click.
Email Marketing
Sent monthly, opened by fourteen percent, read by fewer.
Compliance
Canada's anti-spam law applies to a two-person trade sending forty emails, not only to bulk senders.
Email Marketing
A list of a hundred people who chose to hear from you is worth more than a thousand who did not.
Technical
Your quotes are landing in junk folders and nobody is telling you.
Compliance
Found on a search, saved from a supplier, sent by a customer, or taken by an employee.
Technical
On the website, on a phone, in a messaging app, on a memory card, and in one place somebody set up in 2016.
Content
A photograph of a screen, cropped from a phone, scaled up to fit.
Accessibility
Alt text is not a caption, not a keyword field, and not optional.
Technical
IMG_4471.jpg tells nobody anything, including you.
Branding
It looks excellent on the sign and on the letterhead.
Content
Empty rooms and finished work show competence.
Content
The customer will not let you photograph their house, their office, or their premises.
Content
The pair is the most persuasive thing a trade can show.
Content
You do not need a camera or a lesson.
Performance
Same total time. One feels fast, one feels broken.
Web Design
Something started playing in an open office and the visitor left before finding the mute control.
Web Design
Five rotating panels at the top of the homepage.
Performance
Three tools give three answers and none of them is wrong.
Performance
This week Google published three metrics for measuring how a page feels to use.
Performance
Each one solved a problem once.
Performance
Six weights downloaded, two on the page.
Performance
One page, and the browser fetches sixty separate files from eleven different companies.
Performance
Straight off a phone, uploaded as it came, displayed at a fifth of its size.
Performance
It loads instantly on your office computer.
Consulting
Quotes, invoices, job sheets and certificates all work perfectly well as files.
Consulting
A missed call from a new customer is usually a lost job.
Consulting
Everything about the job is in your head or in a notebook only you can decode.
Consulting
Two people, one diary, and a double booking every fortnight.
Technical
The drawing is on the office computer, you are forty minutes away, and the customer is waiting.
Technical
Quotes written in a lay-by, invoices sent from a driveway, and a phone that is the entire back office.
Compliance
Writing card numbers on a job sheet is common, understandable, and one of the riskier things a small business does.
Compliance
An emailed agreement with a typed name at the bottom is usually binding.
Consulting
Six blurry pictures and a question about price.
Consulting
A video call can replace a first visit for a lot of work.
Technical
The number is on six vans. It belongs to the phone company.
Consulting
You cannot know which supplier will fail or when.
Consulting
Signature requirements, delivery windows, surcharges and service suspensions all change without much notice.
Consulting
A site advertising same-week service while you are booked into July is generating enquiries you will disappoint.
Consulting
Forty names in a notebook, half of them from four months ago, and no idea which are still live.
Consulting
A deposit secures a commitment.
Consulting
A quote given on Monday is honoured in June at Monday's materials price.
Consulting
What they ordered is unavailable and something similar is not.
Consulting
A page saying two to three weeks was right when it was written.
Consulting
The delay is not usually what makes somebody angry.
Consulting
They asked when. Your supplier does not know either.
Email Marketing
It has the highest open rate of anything you send and it was written by the platform.
Ecommerce
Selling in a shop and online from the same shelf means the numbers are always slightly wrong.
Ecommerce
Gift cards, deposits, bookings for later, and services delivered at a distance.
Ecommerce
Most returns policies are written to limit liability and read as a warning.
Ecommerce
Card numbers should never touch your website.
Ecommerce
The most common customer email is one a page could answer.
Ecommerce
Three to five days sounds harmless.
Ecommerce
An unexpected postage figure at the last step is the most common reason a basket is abandoned.
Ecommerce
The manufacturer's text is on every other site selling the same thing.
Ecommerce
Online, the photograph is the product.
Ecommerce
Selling one thing properly teaches you more than launching a catalogue of forty.
Technical
Five minutes, from outside the business, on a phone.
Conversion
No number, no address, no name.
Conversion
They contacted three of you. One replied that afternoon.
Conversion
For some trades, letting somebody pick a slot removes three days of back and forth.
Conversion
Somebody wants a price and has given you three words.
Conversion
It is on the form because forms have it.
Technical
Four systems between the button and your inbox.
Conversion
The thank you message is the last thing a customer sees and the least designed thing on most sites.
Conversion
On a phone, a number that is not a link has to be memorised, retyped and dialled.
Conversion
Every field is a small request.
Conversion
It said thank you. It sent nothing. For four months.
Content
It still reads well and it describes a business you no longer are.
Content
Price, wait times, and what you refuse to do.
Content
You call it a mini-split.
Content
Most visitors are standing somewhere, holding a phone, half paying attention.
Content
Nobody reads long pages, except the people who are about to spend money, who read all of it.
Content
A bulleted list of what is included tells the reader what you do.
Content
It gets a fraction of the traffic and a disproportionate share of the decisions.
Content
The line under your logo is read by everybody and written by nobody.
Content
Most visitors do not arrive at your homepage.
Local Marketing
Relevance, distance, prominence. Only two of them are yours.
Local Marketing
Somebody drove twenty minutes on a Monday because your listing said you were open.
Local Marketing
Somebody verified it in 2016. It was not you.
Local Marketing
There are hundreds of them and most are worthless.
Local Marketing
You serve four towns and appear in one.
Local Marketing
People look at the pictures before they read anything.
Local Marketing
Unit 4 on the listing, Suite 4 on the website, and no unit number at all on the invoice.
Local Marketing
One setting decides whether your address is published and how far your listing reaches.
Local Marketing
One dropdown decides which searches you can appear in at all.
Local Marketing
It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a lot of local trades it produces more enquiries than the website does.
Technical
Whether the shop lives at shop.yourname or yourname/shop looks like a technical detail.
Domains
They warned you four times. Nobody read any of them.
Domains
Somebody helpful set it up years ago.
Consulting
Five or six accounts control whether your business is online.
Hosting
The website migration goes fine.
Hosting
Ninety-nine point nine percent sounds like a guarantee.
Hosting
Almost every business has backups.
Hosting
Most small businesses take the mailboxes that come free with hosting.
Hosting
The first year was the offer.
Hosting
Your site sits on a machine with dozens of others you cannot see.
Hosting
Every plan lists disk space and bandwidth.
Domains
You will say it over the phone, write it on a van, and spell it out to somebody in a noisy room.
Consulting
Launch is treated as the finish line.
Search
The version you never look at is the one being judged.
Technical
Adobe stops supporting it in December.
Content
Every website quote assumes somebody produces the words.
Consulting
Quoted at three weeks, delivered in three months, and the gap is almost never the building.
Hosting
Two separate things, bought together, from different companies, renewing on different dates.
Consulting
Projects do not stall on design.
Web Design
The builders are genuinely good now.
Web Design
A business page is free, quick, and already where your customers are.
Web Design
Some businesses genuinely do not need one yet.
Try a broader term, or clear the filters to see everything.
West Coast Media Solutions builds, hosts, and maintains websites for businesses across Canada, with the strategy work to go with it.
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