Why local still matters
I’m in Western New York, so a good share of my clients are close enough to sit down with. Buffalo, Amherst, Clarence, Williamsville, Lancaster, Depew, Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, Lockport, Hamburg, Orchard Park, East Aurora, and the towns in between. I work with businesses well outside all of that too, and this page is about what changes when you’re nearby.
Local matters more than it sounds like it should. I can sit down at your shop instead of running a call, and I can take the photos myself if the ones you have are five years old. I also know the difference between a place on Hertel and a place in Clarence Hollow well enough that the site sounds like where it is.
It also matters for how people find you. A tavern in Amherst and a salon in Clarence Hollow are competing for entirely different searches, and the local setup that goes into a Full Business Site is built around the actual town, not a generic radius.
Sites I’ve built around here
One is on Main Street in Amherst and one is in the Historic Clarence Hollow, both on their own domains and owned outright by the client.
What a local site actually has to do
A site out here has a short list of jobs and it has to do all of them. It has to turn up when somebody types in the name of your town, because that’s how people search when they’re two miles away and deciding where to go. It has to carry hours that are right, current enough that people stop calling to check before they drive over.
The phone number has to be a button, because nobody is going to pinch, zoom, and copy ten digits by hand to reach you. And it has to load on a phone, in a parking lot, on whatever signal is left out there, because that’s where nearly everyone is going to see it.
None of that is fancy. It’s the part that gets skipped when a site comes off a template built by somebody who has never stood in front of your building.
What it costs
Three packages: $500 for a one-page Storefront Site, $900 for the Full Business Site most established shops land on, and $1,400 for a Self-Serve Site you update yourself. Half to start, half on delivery. Everything that’s included, plus add-ons and the two optional care plans, is on the pricing page.
Related
If you’re not in the Buffalo area, the main small business websites page covers the same work without the local part: the three packages side by side, what’s usually wrong with the site you already have, and the questions people ask first.
Tell me about your business
You don’t need to know what you want the site to say. A sentence about what you do is plenty to start with.