Web design for Towamba businesses
When the river comes up, the road closes and the village is on its own. Your website is the one part of the business that is not cut off, which is a bigger deal here than almost anywhere.
The one part of the business the river cannot reach
Towamba sits on a river in a valley west of Eden, and the river can close the road and cut the village off. That is an ordinary fact of life here and everybody local plans around it.
It has a commercial consequence that is easy to miss. When people cannot get to you, everything they know about you has to come from somewhere else. Whether you are trading, whether you can deliver, whether the order is still on, when you expect to be back on the road. Most rural businesses answer that on the phone, one call at a time, on the day they are least able to.
A website answers it once, for everybody, at three in the morning if that is when somebody looks. It does not need to be sophisticated to do that. It needs to be somewhere you can update from a phone with one bar of signal, which is a design decision that gets made at the beginning or not at all. Website design
What "still trading" looks like when nobody can drive in
The version that actually works in a place like this is unglamorous and it is the same shape every time. One page that is easy to change and obviously current. A dated note at the top rather than a buried blog. A phone number that dials. And hosting that does not fall over on the one weekend the whole valley is looking at it, which is invariably the weekend something has gone wrong.
That last point is worth a sentence of its own. A site that is fine on an ordinary Tuesday and unavailable during the event it exists to report is worse than no site, because people learn not to check it. Web hosting
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 people ring you about when the road is shut. That is the page, and the rest of the site can be built around it.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.