12 KiB
title: No Website, Big Problem: Businesses Can't Survive Without a Website author: 寮 date: 2022-12-21 tags: technology,internet,webdev
If you wonder why all of the sudden I've started almost all words in caps, it's because this article is basically a reply to some rather garbage article I found online. (Link, Archive, images in the archive link may appear broken, but you're not missing out on anything, they're just constantly re-used stock images that have little to do with the text itself anyway).
The article is seemingly targetting normalfags, or smartphone zoombies, or Tech Jews, or tech peasants, or however you want to call it.
Because if you have an online presence, whether as an individual or a business, a website by far the most important factor.
Though I should add, the website needs to be written correctly, because while most people don't even realize their privacy is being violated by using Cuckflare, they can still get super annoyed by ads, popups/popovers, Javascript Shenanigans, among other stuff.
So now I will debunk the falsehoods of that article.
No, a custom website is cheap, and creating from scratch is free of charge
A custom website can cost more than $10,000 a year to keep. Creating a website from scratch will cost more than that.
I have no idea what Kyle was smoking.
How the fuck do you end up paying more than 10,000 USD a year for a custom website!?
I have made websites for normie businesses, and I only charge them 30,000 JPY (so around 260 USD for comparison sake) a year, and it is to cover the costs of domain name (which costs almost nothing these days) and electricity bills for 1 server for an entire year, and I still get to keep a good portion of it for myself.
Meanwhile, creating from scratch is just a matter of taking any random text editor, and write some HTML and CSS, costs absolutely nothing!
It might costs if you use some Adobe suit for outputting HTML and CSS for you, but in that case you're just an idiot anyway.
HTML and CSS are both so easy, even a brainlet can make a website using these!
Website IS promotion
That being said, having a website is not the end game. The objective of every marketing strategy is to attract clients and hold them captive.
Well no, having a website is what makes you relative long term.
What strikes me is that he makes a good point on how having your own website makes you look legitimate and authentic, and that you have complete control over it and what not, and then immediately counters it all with this.
Yes, the objective of every marketing strategy is to attract clients and hold them captive, which is exactly what a business website is for!
That means promoting your business not only through a customized website, but also through blogs, SEO, ads, and other promotional tools.
First off, what the fuck is a non-customized website supposed to be?
You mean like going to some random websoyte, pressing CTRL+S (or CMD+S for the Mac slaves), and then uploading to your own server as is?
As for the other stuff:
- blogs, only if you need to put up information, or you're a personal website like mine. Most companies will probably limit their blogging to just things like "we're closed for new year holidays" or "we're unreachable during Golden Week" or "change in opening time due to government mandates", everything else is usually "this is who we are, this is what we do, you can find us at this address, we earn this much and have this many employees (for public companies and Germans only), you can contact us using this form", and that's usually it.
- SEO, unneeded bloat you can easily ignore. SEO is what destroys search engines, but this needs a blog post on its own, because I have much to rant about this one. I did once, but it's really just an SNS post I once made which I turned into a blog post, I need to expand on this subject at a later point.
- ads, also unneeded bloat, if you're a business you're expected to make enough money outside of your website, no need to worry about this 5 yen a year coin from Goolag (if you're lucky enough to even make this much with ads that is).
- and other promotional tools, so you need to make another website to promote your website? Or do you mean soycial media? Which brings us to the next chapter.
No, website should come before soycial media
Your business could survive without a website, but it’s impossible for it to remain relevant without a social media page.
If you have a well running business in the middle of Shibuya, then yes, your business can survive without a website.
The question is, are your customers going to spread the word for you though?
And no, it's not impossible to remain relevant without a soycial media "page".
I have no "page" on any of the big or alt tech soycial media platforms, only on a rather tiny Fedi instance which isn't even for my business, and yet my business is doing fine.
And if you have, then good luck getting found in an ocean of REEEEing zoomers, cat pictures, and urinalists working for propaganda rags.
Even your local plumber has his own page on social media, so why shouldn’t you?
Likewise, even MY local plumber has his own website, so why shouldn't you?
Isn't it obvious, the double standards?
The difference is, my local plumber can get lots of wokies launching attacks on his website, and he can simply ignore them.
Your local plumber on the other hand, it's a matter of mass reporting by maybe 2 people from 400 different accounts, and his entire career is over.
So if you want to see your local plumber being unable to feed himself because of some idiots who got their feelings hurt, then indeed soycial media should come before a website then...
Choose the best platform for you or sign up for all of them.
Yea, I chose the best platforms, which are Tor and I2P.
No sign up required!
Make sure that the platform you will choose is where your market “hangs out,” and not where you’re more comfortable posting.
Yea, like your own website in HTML and CSS for example.
You can have your own page on social media, specifically Facebook. This is like having your own website, too.
This is a blatant lie.
The Zuckinator can deplatform you for any reason he wants (or gets pressured to do so), and there's no customizability at all, all those so-called "pages" are identical to one other, it's nowhere near like having your own website at all!
Plus you MUST have a Fakebook account in order to see that so-called "page" too, if you don't have an account, can't have an account, or have no account anymore, then those people will never even know your business exists.
Depending on your market, you're cutting out somewhere between quite a bit and the majority of your potential customer base by going that route.
Relying on phone-only tech spells disaster
Thanks to technology, smartphones and tablets now don’t even need a separate app to read QR codes and NFC.
So now you're going as far as to excluding pretty much all privacy aware people and people who simply don't have a satanphone.
Thankfully I've yet to see any business going full blown QR codes and NFC here in Japan, but loli frog who visited Europe last summer noticed that some zoomer run restaurants dumped paper-based menu's and went for QR codes instead.
Want to know her reaction?
She left and looked for some other restaurant.
Privacy aware people are not going to scan QR codes, people who have no satanphone are not going to scan QR codes, and tourists are not going to turn on roaming to then get skyhigh phone bills just to scan QR codes to access a page that's downloading 200 GiB of data just to display a stupid menu over 4G.
A Fakebook profile is NOT a website!!
While you don’t have a website yet, treat your Facebook business profile as your website.
Which is inherently a dumb mistake to make.
About 100 million small businesses are on Facebook promoting their products and services.
And how many of them are making a profit though?
The platform itself has about 2.2 billion active users monthly.
And how many of them consists of bot traffic though?
Facebook has even made it easier to adjust the parameters of an advertisement. You can reach a certain number of people depending on how much you want to pay for it. The platform is data-driven and results-oriented.
Which is exactly why so many people are avoiding Fakebook like the plague these days.
Goolag My Ass
You should take advantage of Google’s business tools. In particular, sign up and register for Google My Business. This will put your local business on the map, literally and figuratively. Potential customers will see your business address on Google Maps. Your business will be on their radar because your listing keeps on popping every time they search using a relevant keyword.
In my own experience, it ONLY works if you're located in a residencial area where barely any business is done.
In business focussed areas you'll getting so many pins of so many different companies, they appear or disappear depending on how much you zoom in and out, because they all overlap each other.
Besides that, what's even the point announcing your business on Goolag Maps if they don't already know your business?
Most people will use Goolag Maps to find out how to get to a business they already know exists, somebody who doesn't isn't going to bother.
Email newsletters are a cancer
Not many people think that email marketing is still effective, but it is. As long as you create an engaging post and an attention-grabbing subject line, customers will want to read what you’re offering.
To me it has the opposite effect.
Once I see a newsletter, I just flag it for deletion, so that Neomutt deletes when I close it.
I try to unsubscribe from them, and if it has no effect, I niggerlist them on the server side so that the newsletter gets returned back to them.
Sometimes they're pretty sneaky with that, because I once had a JewTube sponsorship sucker (I never reply to them, because I don't have a JewTube channel, and I hate sponsorships even more than ads), I niggerlisted their email address, and then they bypassed it by emailing from a different email address.
At one point I've had enough and wildcard blocked all GayMail, Hatemail, Outlock, Jewhoo, and Protonmail addresses, and only then they finally gave up.
The best thing about emails is that you can personalize them to make it look like you’re speaking directly and exclusively to the recipient.
Yet another blatant double standard.
How the fuck is an HTML and CSS website "hard" and "expensive", but an HTML and CSS email isn't!?
Also, Neomutt can't display HTML emails, which is yet another reason why I delete newsletters without reading them.
Every time I get an HTML email even if it's not a newsletter, I just delete it without even looking at it.
Claws Mail can't open HTML email by default too, and that's for a very good security reason.
HTML emails tend to contain literal malware hidden inside of JS scripts, CDN'd scripts, stylesheets, or images, tracking pixels, among other shenanigans.
For this exact reason, mail servers are much more likely to mark HTML emails as spam than text-only emails.
Emails should ALWAYS be text-only, it's the way they're designed to be, it keeps your customers safe, and it keeps your reputation alive.