Web design for Cobargo businesses
Nobody drives to a main street like this by accident. They came for it, and the decision was made at a kitchen table a long way from here.
A street that is itself the reason for the trip
Cobargo's trade is built on a main street of turn-of-the-century buildings and the businesses in them: galleries, makers, antiques, food, the sort of thing somebody browses rather than shops for.
That makes it a destination rather than a convenience, and destinations are marketed completely differently from convenience. A convenience business wins by being closest. A destination business wins by being decided on in advance, because nobody drives half an hour on the off-chance.
So the website is not competing with the shop three doors down. It is competing with every other way somebody could spend a Saturday, and it is doing that competing days or weeks before anybody gets in the car. What settles it is whether they can picture the visit: what is actually here, what it looks like, how long to allow, and what else is worth doing while they are in town. Website design
Somebody browsing is buying differently from somebody shopping
A browser has no list. They are not comparing your price against a competitor's because they did not set out to buy the thing at all. What moves them is the object, seen clearly.
Which makes photography the single highest-return thing on a site like this, and it is where most village businesses under-invest by a wide margin. Not a photograph of the shopfront. Photographs of the actual work, well lit, big enough to see the detail, with enough of them that somebody gets a sense of the range rather than a sample.
If you make things, the same discipline applies to how the business is presented: one consistent mark, one set of colours, on the sign, the labels and the site, so that somebody who saw you at a market recognises you online a fortnight later. Graphic design
Questions about working outside your own town.
The same five come up wherever we are on this coast, so they are answered once here rather than eighty slightly different times.
Will people in the next town along still find us?+
That depends on whether your site ever mentions them, and most do not. Search results shift with where the person is standing, so a business that only ever names its own town tends to vanish about fifteen minutes up the road. The fix is usually structural rather than a rewrite.
How do you decide which towns are worth a page and which are not?+
On whether we can write something true about that town that would not also be true of the one next to it. If we cannot, we do not build the page, because a run of near-identical pages with the name swapped is something search engines actively demote, and the damage lands on the whole site rather than the pages that caused it. Where the honest answer is one page instead of five, we say so.
We are the only business of our kind for half an hour in either direction. Does any of this matter?+
It matters differently. You are not fighting a competitor down the street, you are fighting the assumption that nobody nearby does this at all, which sends people further afield before they ever look properly. Being unmistakably present across the whole stretch is worth more to you than outranking anybody.
Our customers drive to us rather than the other way round. Does that change anything?+
Yes, and it is the thing most sites have backwards. If people travel to you, the page has to lead with where you are and how long it takes to get there. If you travel to them, it has to lead with how far you go. Very few sites answer either question at all, which is why the ones that do get the call.
What happens if we stop covering an area?+
Tell us and we take it down properly, which means the page, the internal links and the service area list all change in the same pass. Claiming somewhere you no longer go is a poor experience for the person who rings, and it eventually becomes a ranking problem as well.
Tell us what you make or sell and we will tell you honestly whether the site or the photography is the better first spend. Quite often it is the photography.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.