Searching for the Nonexistent Website
October 1st, 2010 | Online & Small Business Resources,Small Business | No Comments »You’re in the mood for Chinese food tonight. You use Google to pull up a list of several Chinese restaurants in your area. The name of a particular restaurant grabs your interest. The phone number and address are listed, but you want to know more. Do they have steamed dumplings? Is the setting formal or casual? Why haven’t you heard of this place before? You don’t see a website for the restaurant, but you figure they must have one, so you continue searching. Fifteen minutes have passed and even though you have read several reviews of the restaurant, you still haven’t found the website. You still don’t know if they have steamed dumplings! At this point you’re annoyed, and hungry! Why don’t they have a website? They must be unprofessional, behind the times, or just lazy. You don’t waste any more time on this restaurant. You pick the next restaurant on the list, one that is linked to a website.
Does this sound familiar to you? Have you ever spent far too much time searching the Internet for a particular website, only to discover that…there is no website? Maybe you were looking for a doctor’s office, a plumber, or a Chinese restaurant. How did you feel when this happened? I feel beyond irritated in such scenarios. A product of my Internet-dependent generation (18- to 29-year-old “Millennials”), I’m accustomed to accessing an absurd amount of information and services with the click of a button. Using the Internet, I can learn a language, view satellite imagery, and even find my soul mate, but I can’t get an accurate profile of what services/products a company offers its customers! Am I asking too much of small businesses? Is there a generational divide here? What do you think?
