Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Do you need a website
For anybody not sure it is worth bothering Written to be useful if the answer is no

You might not need a website. You do need to be found.

One published survey of the Asia-Pacific markets put the share of New Zealand businesses with no website at close to half, and plenty of them are doing perfectly well. That is because a website is not one thing. It is six separate jobs, and a free Google listing already does three of them well enough for most people. This page is about working out which of the six you are actually short of. For a fair number of readers the answer is none of them this year, and the sensible spend is $395 on the listing.

The six jobs When the answer is no
The honest answer, oftenNot this year
Cheapest thing that helps$395, no website
If you do want oneFrom $2,450, GST in
Ask before you spend022 584 0585
01 / THE SIX JOBS

Six jobs. A free
listing already does
three of them.

"Do I need a website" is the wrong question, and it is why the answer people get is always yes. The useful question is which of these six things your business is currently short of — because three of them can be fixed this week for $395, and the other three cannot be fixed any other way.

01
The listing does this

Being found by somebody who does not know your name

Somebody in Massey types the trade and the suburb into a phone. What comes back first is the map, and what is in the map is listings rather than websites. If you are not in it you are not in the running, and no amount of website fixes that on its own.

What a free Google listing doesNearly all of it. Being in the map result is a listing job, and one published estimate has only about a third of small businesses with a profile at all. What a site addsSomething for the searches the map does not answer — the job written out by name, which is how you turn up for "replace a hot water cylinder" rather than only for "plumber near me".
02
The listing does this

Being believed by a stranger

A stranger decides whether you are legitimate in about ten seconds, and mostly he does it on reviews and photographs. Published research on the point is blunt: the most common reason people give for not ringing a local business at all is something about its reviews. Price is not in the reasons.

What a free Google listing doesAll of it, and better than a website can. Reviews are not yours to write, which is exactly why they are believed. What a site addsVery little to this one. A site with no reviews behind it is a well-dressed stranger. Get the reviews first.
03
The listing mostly does this

Being reachable at the moment somebody decides

The decision is usually made on a phone, one-handed, and often outside your working hours. What it needs is a number that rings, hours that are right, and an answer to "are you open now".

What a free Google listing doesThe phone call, the hours and the directions, which is most of it. Keeping the public holidays right on there is worth more than most of a website. What a site addsThe enquiry from the person who will not ring — the nine o'clock one, from somebody who would rather type than talk. That is a real share of enquiries and a listing has nowhere to put it.
04
Only a site does this

Being understood before the first phone call

What you do and do not take on, what a job like theirs usually runs to, where you will and will not drive, what happens after they get in touch. A listing has room for none of it, so every one of those questions arrives as a phone call, and the ones that do not arrive are people who guessed and guessed wrong.

What a free Google listing doesA description of 750 characters. It is enough to say what you are. It is not enough to answer anything. What a site addsThis is the first job on the list that a website is genuinely the only answer to, and it is the one that quietly saves you hours a week.
05
Only a site does this

Being something a customer can forward to somebody else

Half the jobs worth having are not decided by the person who rang you. There is a partner, a landlord, a body corporate, a committee, a manager who signs things off. That person wants a link, and what he does with it is decide whether you look like the safe option.

What a free Google listing doesNothing useful. Nobody forwards a map pin to a landlord. What a site addsThe thing that gets sent on. If your work involves anybody having to be convinced who never speaks to you, this row on its own is the reason to build.
06
Not about customers

Being somewhere you own

A listing is Google's. The rules change, the layout changes, a profile can be suspended over something you did not do, and you cannot alter a line of how it looks. None of that is a reason to skip it — it is free and it works. It is a reason not to let it be the only place your business exists.

What a free Google listing doesEverything it does, on somebody else's terms, at somebody else's discretion. What a site addsAn address that is yours, on a domain in your name, with the content in your hands. It is the only job on this list that is about the next ten years rather than next week.

Three of six is not a criticism of Google listings — it is an argument for getting one, and for not paying anybody four figures to do the part that is free. The whole of that job, and what it does not buy, is on the $395 page.

02 / WHEN IT IS NO

Six businesses that
should not buy a
website this year.

We turn work away for these reasons and we would rather say so here than on a call you have already made time for. If one of these is you, the honest advice is the $395 listing and nothing else — or nothing at all, which is also a service we will happily provide.

The commonest case by a distance

Your work already comes from people who know you

If the last dozen jobs came from repeat customers, a builder who passes you work and your brother-in-law's street, you do not have a being-found problem and a website will not create one. What it would do is sit there. Get the listing right so the referrals can look you up and find something current, and spend the rest on the van.

One channel, and it works

You sell on Instagram, Trade Me or at a market, and it is working

A page of your own is worth having eventually because the channel is not yours. But if the enquiries are arriving and you are answering them, the website is a second job you have not got time for. The version that helps now is a bio link that goes somewhere with prices on it — and a listing, so the people who do search by name find you.

Wait six months

The business is about to change shape

New name, a partner coming in, a service you are about to drop, a move across town. A site built around what you do this quarter is a site rebuilt in the spring, and you pay for both. Say so when you ring and we will tell you to wait. The listing can be corrected in ten minutes whenever the shape settles.

A stale site is worse than none

Nobody is going to keep it current

Prices from two years ago, a number that changed, a closed sign on a day you are open. A visitor cannot tell the difference between an out-of-date site and a business that has stopped trading, and he does not ring to check. If nobody in the business is going to look at it and nobody is paying anybody to, the honest answer is not to build one.

Nothing to show yet

There are no photographs of your own work

In most trades the photographs are the evidence, and a site built out of stock pictures of somebody else's van is worse than a listing with four real ones on it. This is the easiest of the six to fix and it costs nothing: take the photos for a couple of months first, put them on the listing, then talk to us. You will get a better site for it.

Spend it where it goes furthest

The whole budget is a few hundred dollars

Then it is the listing, and we would rather sell you that than talk you into stretching. We do not discount off-menu and we do not build a cut-price version, because a cheap site from a studio with no track record is a bad deal for both of us. $395, done properly in a day, and come back when the money is there.

None of those six is a soft no. If you ring and describe one of them, that is what you will be told, and there is nothing else on the end of it.

03 / WHEN IT COSTS

Not having one
never announces
itself.

This is the difficult part of the decision: the cost of having no website is entirely invisible from inside the business. Nobody rings to say they chose somebody else because there was nothing to look at. So here are four signs you can check yourself, without believing a word we say.

What you lose

The comparison you are not in

Somebody has three names and is deciding between them on a phone, at night. Two of them have something to read. The third has a listing and nothing else. He is not rejected — he is simply the one there is least to say about, and the shortlist goes to two.

How to check it yourself: ask the last customer who found you cold what else he looked at, and what made him ring you rather than them. The answer is usually specific and it is usually free.

What you repeat

The same question, twenty times a week

Do you come out to Kumeū. What does a callout cost. Do you do weekends. Are you insured. Every one of them is a phone call you take while holding something, and every one of them is a sentence on a page that would have answered it before the phone rang.

How to check it yourself: keep a tally on the dashboard for one week. If the same four questions make up most of it, section 01 row 04 is the job you are short of and it is worth money to you.

What you cannot send

The thing they have to show somebody else

A partner, a landlord, a body corporate, a property manager, a committee. Somebody who will never speak to you is signing off on the job, and all he has to go on is what the person who rang you can forward him. If that is a phone number in a text message, you are being compared with whoever sent a link.

How to check it yourself: think about the last three jobs over ten thousand dollars. Count how many of them involved somebody you never met approving it.

What you never hear about

The job that quietly went to the tidier quote

The bigger and more careful the customer, the more he treats the absence of a website as information about how the business is run. That is not fair, and it is not about the quality of your work, and it happens anyway. The jobs it costs you are the ones at the top end, which are the ones you would have wanted.

How to check it yourself: look at where the last year's biggest jobs came from. If every one of them came from somebody who already knew you, that is the ceiling, and it is the thing a site moves.

If none of those four rings true, go back to section 02 and pick the case that fits you. Both halves of this page are meant honestly, and the first half applies to more readers than the second.

04 / THE TEST

Seven questions.
Ask yourself, not us.
Half an hour, tonight.

Not one of these needs anything from us and not one of them needs any technical knowledge. Work down them in order and by the seventh you will know which of the three answers you are looking at: nothing this year, the listing, or a site. Any of the three is a real result.

  1. Question 1

    Where did the last five jobs actually come from?

    Write them down. Repeat customer, referral, a trade contact, the market, a cold search. If four or five of them came from somebody who already knew you, you have no being-found problem and a website will not invent one — that is case one in section 02. If two or more came from a stranger searching, keep going.

  2. Question 2

    What is the question you answer most often on the phone?

    There is always one, and it is usually about area, price or availability. If you can name it without thinking, you have just named the page that would pay for itself. If nothing comes to mind, that is a genuine sign the phone is not the bottleneck.

  3. Question 3

    Has anybody ever asked you to send them something?

    "Have you got a website I can show him." If that sentence has been said to you in the last six months, section 01 row 05 is the job you are short of, and it is the one where a listing is no help at all. If it has never come up, your customers are deciding on their own and this matters less than the rest.

  4. Question 4

    Type your trade and your suburb into your own phone. Are you there?

    Do it standing somewhere other than your own kitchen, because a map result is built around where the searcher is and from home you are reading the most flattering version the city can give you. If you are not in the map, that is a listing job, and it is $395 rather than a build.

  5. Question 5

    While you are there — is what it says about you right?

    The hours, the number, the categories, the service areas, whether there are two listings with your name on them. Most profiles were never filled in properly and a fair few were created by Google rather than by the owner. Fixing that is the highest-value half hour available to most businesses and you can do a lot of it yourself, tonight, for nothing.

  6. Question 6

    If you had a site, who would keep it right?

    Name the person. If the answer is you, and you know yourself well enough to know that is not going to happen, then either it is a care plan or it is case four in section 02 and the answer is no. A site nobody is looking after is a liability with a domain name.

  7. Unasked

    If your Google listing disappeared tomorrow, what would be left?

    Profiles do get suspended, sometimes over a change of address or a category, sometimes for no reason the owner is ever told, and the appeal takes as long as it takes. If the honest answer is "nothing", that is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to spend four figures this afternoon. It is the reason the sixth job on the list exists, and the only question here that is about the next ten years rather than next month.

05 / THE NUMBERS

Four answers,
and the first one
is free.

Put these against the seven questions. Most readers who work through the test honestly land on one of the first two, and we would rather that than have somebody stretch for the third and resent it.

Nothing this year

If section 02 described your business, this is the answer, and you will get it from us on the phone rather than a proposal. Take the photographs, ask the last four customers for a review, and ring back when something has changed.

$0and no follow-up

Google Business Profile setup

The three jobs the listing does, done properly, in a day. Claimed, verified, categories, service areas, hours including the awkward ones, photographs, the description, and a way of asking for reviews that you will actually use. Registered to you, not to us.

$395one-off, no website

Essential — up to four pages

The smallest honest website: what you do, who you are, what it costs to get you out, how to get hold of you. The right size when jobs four and five on the list are what you are short of and nothing more.

$2,450founding price $1,950

Standard — up to eight pages

A page for each service, which is what turns you up for the job rather than only for the trade. The tier most businesses should take if they are building at all.

$3,450founding price $2,950

Lead Engine — services and suburbs

Everything in Standard, a page for each area worth having, a local search campaign at launch, the after-hours enquiry assistant for twelve months and three months of care. For businesses where being found in specific places is the whole game.

$5,950founding price $5,450

Care plan

The answer to question six when the honest answer is "nobody". Hosting, updates, backups, the small changes you text through, and a monthly look at the Google profile. No lock-in, and the site stays yours whether you take it or not.

$169per month, or $1,690 a year

Every figure includes GST and nothing is added at the end. The founding price is $500 off, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job — an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to show the build. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not go under the list either way. If you do decide on a site, we build your homepage before you pay anything — if you do not like it you walk away owing nothing. And the full explanation of what moves these numbers is on the costs page.

06 / STRAIGHT UP

Why a studio
is telling you
this.

Is this reverse psychology? No, but it is not selfless either, so here is the actual arithmetic. A website sold to somebody in one of the six situations in section 02 does not get looked after, does not produce anything, and ends up as a customer who tells people the money was wasted. There is no version of that which is good for us. The work worth having is the build that was the right call, and the only way to find those is to say no to the rest out loud.

So this is a way of selling the $395 thing. Partly, yes — plainly so, and it is the cheapest thing we sell for a reason. Two things are also true: you can do most of that job yourself for nothing, which is said on this page and on the $395 page in more detail, and if you buy the listing and never come back we have made $395 and are perfectly content. The point of an easy first thing is that it is easy to walk away from.

What if the answer really is nothing at all? Then that is what you will be told, on the phone, in about four minutes, and nobody will ring you back in the spring to check. There is no salesperson here to be measured on a pipeline — Josh reads the enquiries himself, which is the whole reason this page can afford to argue against itself.

And the part we cannot dress up. Skyward is new and has no clients yet. There are no testimonials on this site because there are none to print, and the builds in the portfolio are invented businesses, labelled as such on every page of them. Everything above is about how the decision works rather than about how many of them we have been through, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

07 / QUESTIONS

Six we get asked
before there is
any money involved.

Is a Facebook page enough?

For some businesses, with a Google listing beside it, yes. It does part of being believed and part of being reachable, and if your customers are already there it is doing real work. What it does not do is turn up for somebody who has never heard of you and is searching for the job, and it is not somewhere you own — the reach and the rules are not yours to set.

If it is working, leave it working. The first thing worth adding is not a website, it is the listing.

Is a Google listing a website?

No, and the free one-page site Google used to offer alongside profiles was retired, so a listing is a listing. It does three of the six jobs in section 01 and it does them better than most websites manage. It cannot answer a question, cannot be forwarded to somebody who needs convincing, and is not yours.

I have got a one-page site from years ago. Does that count?

It counts for job six — you own something — and for very little else if the details on it are wrong. An out-of-date site reads to a stranger like a business that has stopped trading, which is worse than having nothing, and that is the one case where replacing it is more urgent than building from scratch.

Look at it on a phone. If the number is right and the prices are not there at all, it may only need an afternoon rather than a rebuild, and we will say so.

How long does it take, if I do decide?

The listing is one session with you and a day of our work. A website is usually two to four weeks from the go-ahead, and the part that decides it is how quickly the words and photographs come back — which is the honest answer to why some builds take three months.

Can I start with the profile and add a site later without paying twice?

Yes, and that is the sequence we would recommend to most people reading this page. The listing work is the first thing we would do for a website client anyway, so it is not repeated — it comes off the list. Nothing about it is locked to us either: it is registered to you, we are added as a manager, and we come off the moment you want us off.

What if I would rather build it myself?

Plenty of people do it well and we will tell you so. The cost is not the subscription, it is the weekend, and the usual failure is not a bad site — it is a half-finished one that sat there for a year. If you enjoy that sort of thing it is a real answer.

The homepage sets that out properly, alongside the other routes, including the two where the answer is not us.

ALSO WRITTEN

Where to go
from each answer.

One for each of the three results the test can give you, and all three are written the same way this page is — useful to somebody who then goes and hires a competitor.

If it is the listing

The three jobs that are free, and what $395 buys.

The whole job set out step by step, so you can decide whether to pay somebody for it or spend an afternoon doing it yourself. It also says plainly what it does not buy, which is a ranking.

 If it is yes

Two quotes, four thousand apart, neither one lying.

What actually moves the number between one studio and the next, the running costs no build price includes, and eight questions to put to anybody quoting you — this studio included.

 The last question

What you would have left, and whose name it is in.

The accounts a website actually consists of, who they should be registered to, and the checks you can run tonight on whatever you have got already. It is question seven, answered at length.
08 / ASK

Describe the business.
We will tell you
which of the three
it is.

No meeting and no discovery session. Say what you do, where the last few jobs came from and whether anybody has ever asked you to send them something, and you will get one of three answers: nothing this year, the listing, or a site — with the reasoning attached. The first of those three is the one we give most often and it costs you nothing to hear it.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz The cheap answerThe $395 listing, in full

Josh reads these himself. Nothing is passed to a salesperson, because there is not one, and asking whether you need a website does not put you on a list.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. No spam, no obligation, no sales sequence. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.