The basics, folks, the basics…
May 18th, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |My wife and I got to take a day off, so we drove up the coast to Carpenteria to check out antique stores (of course). The night before we left, like a good web developers wife, she checked Google for a list of antique stores in the town. We were going on a Monday, which is a popular day for them to be closed. She wanted to check to be sure they were open.
First issue that she had was that not all of the listings for web pages from the shops themselves. There were a lot of yellow pages and local directories kinds of listings. From those, she got to most of the shop’s web pages. Hello? Why would your own web site not be listed first for YOUR BUSINESS? Why? I can’t comprehend.
Victoria took this photo of an actual sign.
We're sorry you will be open too.
OK, out of 10 shops, there were exactly none of them that listed their hours. None. Zero. No one.
Un-freakin-believable.
This is like paying for a listing in the yellow pages and not putting your phone number in. Please, if nothing else, please put your hours into your web site. Probably next to your contact information that you have on every page is a good place to do that. What? You don’t have contact info on every page?
Sigh.
Of course, I’ve been guilty of this as many times as I’ve seen other people do it. It’s easy to forget the basics. Ask yourself, why do you want a web site? What do you expect it to do for you? Then, how will it do it?
If you want customers to come into your store, then you need the address, phone, and hours on the site. If you want to make money from advertising, then you need to have the advertising HTML tags in the site.
It’s all really simple, but easy to forget. This is our reminder.
I don't want to offend all the Toyota owners. 
