Your Facebook Page Is The Website
For a lot of businesses here that is simply true, and it is not a failure. The mistake is building a site that tries to compete with it.
Start from what is true
A city of 108,843, seven hundred kilometres from the nearest larger one, runs on a small number of places where everybody looks. Here, one of them is a feed.
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population
Ontario Ministry of Transportation, Highway 17 distances
City of Thunder Bay
In Thunder Bay, hours go on the page. Specials go on the page. A photograph of today’s work goes on the page, somebody asks a question in the comments, and it is answered in four minutes. That is a functioning channel and nothing a web designer builds is going to replace it.
Which is why most Thunder Bay website projects start from the wrong premise. They set out to build a better version of the feed: a news section nobody updates, a gallery that goes stale by March, an events page that still lists last summer. Six months later the feed is current and the site is embarrassing.
A Thunder Bay site that does not try to be the feed can be good at the things the feed is bad at, and there are exactly four of them.
The division of labour
Not a list of what is wrong with social media in Thunder Bay. A list of what has to live somewhere else, and why.
Ownership is the one Thunder Bay owners dismiss until it happens. A page can be locked out, misclassified, or lost with the phone number of whoever set it up eleven years ago. The business that has no other address then has no address, and rebuilding an audience is far harder than building one, because the people are still there and the route to them is gone.
Being found is the other half. Somebody in Thunder Bay who already follows you will see the feed; somebody who has never heard of you is typing into a search box, and a social page is a poor answer to that search. Web design thunder bay businesses actually need is mostly about this second person, because the first one is already handled.
Where to spend
A Thunder Bay site with a blog, a news section, an events calendar and a gallery, all of which require somebody to keep them current, and none of which anybody does. Within a year it reads as abandoned, which is a worse signal than having no site at all. A thunder bay web design quote that includes four content sections is quoting for work nobody has agreed to do.
In Thunder Bay, build only what stays true. Prices and how they work, what you can and cannot do, policies, how to reach you, and proof of real work. Five pages, fast, owned, written once. Then leave the current stuff on the channel that is already good at it.
The connection
Everybody in Thunder Bay says the word. Almost nobody tests the thing it is supposed to describe.
Outside, on a Thunder Bay phone, on whatever signal the highway gives you. A site approved on an office connection has been approved under conditions no customer will ever have.
On a Thunder Bay connection a hero video and four uncompressed photographs are most of the delay. Removing them is free, immediate, and worth more than any other performance work on a small site.
The phone number, the directions and the main action should all be reachable without a second hand. Nothing important should depend on hovering, because on the device most people use there is no such thing.
How it goes
Four stages for a Thunder Bay build, and the first decision is what not to build.
Week one
Agree out loud that Thunder Bay news, events and daily photographs stay where they already work. That single decision removes most of the maintenance burden and most of the reason sites here go stale, and it is the conversation that almost never happens.
Weeks one and two
Thunder Bay prices and how they work, what you can and cannot take on, your policies, how to reach you, and proof of real jobs. These are hard to write and then they are done, which is the opposite of the content most sites are sold.
Week three
Compressed images sized for the Thunder Bay screen asking for them, no hero video, no carousel, and a test on a real phone outside rather than a resized desktop window. On a five-page site this is achievable rather than aspirational.
Before launch
The domain registered to the Thunder Bay business, the hosting account in the owner’s email, and a written note of where everything lives. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between an inconvenience and a catastrophe the day something goes wrong.
Questions
In Thunder Bay you need a small one, for four reasons the feed cannot cover. It cannot be found by somebody who has never heard of you and is typing into a search box. It cannot hold the things that must not expire, like prices and policies. It is rented rather than owned, so a lockout removes your whole presence at once. And it is somebody else’s performance decision on a phone with one bar. A five-page site covers all four and needs almost no upkeep.
Almost certainly not, if the Thunder Bay feed is already active. A news section competes directly with something that is already working and will be updated more often, and within a year the site reads as abandoned, which is worse than having no site. Build only what stays true. If there is a genuine content plan with somebody accountable for it, that is a different conversation, and it is a rarer one than quotes suggest.
In Thunder Bay it should mean the page loads in about a second on one bar of signal, tested on a real phone outdoors, with images sized for the screen requesting them and the phone number reachable with one thumb. What it usually means is that the layout reflows when somebody drags a desktop browser narrower. A page that reflows beautifully and takes nine seconds to appear has failed at the only thing that mattered.
Thunder Bay sites go stale because they are built with sections nobody agreed to maintain. A gallery, an events page and a news feed all require a person and a habit, and the habit usually belongs to the channel that already has it. Deciding at the start that those stay on social, and that the site holds only permanent things, is the single change that keeps a site from looking abandoned in its second year.
The Thunder Bay business, in the business’s name, with the login in an email address the owner controls. This takes twenty minutes at launch and is routinely skipped, which is how a company ends up unable to change its own hours because the only account holder left in 2019. Ask for a written note of where the domain is registered, where the site is hosted, and who has access, before the final invoice is paid.
Next step
Tell us where your customers actually find you. We will tell you which parts of that you own and which parts you are renting.
NewLife Marketing · 70 Bearberry Rd, Minesing, ON L9X 2E1 · 705-302-1097 · Serving Thunder Bay and the surrounding area.
Where to go next
