At this point in the game, all (or most) of us have heard about SquareSpace—the company that provides its customers with easy to build, easy-to-use websites that are beautifully designed, feature-rich, and useful in most business applications. You might also be familiar with them as a result of their fairly comprehensive run of YouTube ads, and broad roster of YouTube creators that they pay on a regular basis to promote the simplicity, and centrality, of their product.
What they advertise is also accompanied with a slogan that “you aren’t really in business without a website.” It’s sensible, it’s catchy and at least on face value, it’s true. But is it actually advice? Or is it just another tagline to sell what is considerably a mid-tier CMS platform? In 2020, the importance of a website to a business borders on self-explanatory, but SquareSpace is suggesting something else—that a website is not only essential to business, it predicates business itself.
Mind you, this piece is not an indictment of SquareSpace’s product: It mostly meets the advertised quality. While no, I do not think SquareSpace is a replacement for more robust, industry-grade solutions such as WordPress, they offer a quality product for those that want to get something launched quickly, and keep it maintained with little or no fuss.
But an important question is being asked: is a website foundational to galvanizing a business’ operations? Most people in the digital age would say yes. I’m sure that SquareSpace would also like to have you believe this to be true. It is a belief system that feels good, sounds good, and ties the most nebulous responsibilities of creating a profitable business to something that is wholly palpable—it is a statement that takes a generally unclear process, and connects it to dollars and cents, or a clearly-defined time investment.
And while Squarespace’s marketing evokes all of these layers of interpretation and meaning, it should never be forgotten the company’s advertising is exactly that—its advertising, and in the vein of many advertisements, its message is either over-simplified, or quite simply half-true.
In all fairness, much of this slogan is targeted at creatives—writers, photographers, videographers and designers. Most of these professions are not so much driven by inventory constraints as they are driven by soft, and transferrable skillsets. Insofar as people in these professions needing websites for their skillsets to be discovered, SquareSpace’s slogan is fairly accurate. Without a website, people in these professions aren’t really in business: There is nowhere to show off examples of work, field new clients, or drive views for deliverables such as written pieces, videos and podcasts. Additionally, it is much harder to anchor paid promotional efforts to any kind of customer journey, sales funnel, or wheelhouse of deliverables.
This is to say that a website is essential to a business and a business’ operations. It is even so essential that it can be a defining factor in shaping the volume, and quality, of a business’ host of clients. But this does not mean that a website affirmatively is a defining factor in the lead-generation process. Thus, while SquareSpace may assert that “you aren’t really in business without a website,” I’m asserting that you aren’t really in business with one either.
While a website is often seen as an equivalent to a digital storefront, what is easily missed about SquareSpace’s advertising is that a website is most crucially a destination for streamlined ideas. I think this is important to clarify, and primarily because it is far too easy to assume that starting a website is tantamount to starting a business—the thing is, if you don’t have anything that provides directionality to your business, then all you have is a website.
Nothing about a professional-grade website is cheap: They are not cheap to build, they are not cheap to maintain, and they are not cheap to fix—even when you know how to do these things yourself. Without elements such as a strong brand, an industry vertical, or clearly-articulated specializations, a website is nothing more than a large, annualized bill that provides your business with nominal—or nonexistent—return on investment.
Though it may be nice to think of a website as a business, here’s the reality: a business is a business. A website is affirmatively a business when it is monetized with ads. Until websites have the capacity to imbue the average entrepreneur with a sense of brand, specialization, or industry vertical, I doubt that this reality is inclined to change. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t develop an online presence, or that a website is a wholly “optional” addition to your business operations, but it is to say that like all things, it is possible fuck this up for want of an order of operations. Whether you are with an established brand, or a fresh startup, before commissioning a designer to get started on a new website build for your business, or signing up for SquareSpace, maybe you should consider these three things:
What do you sell?
At this point you should have already identified what it is that you sell. If you haven’t, then perhaps it is time to go back to the drawing board. For those who have an idea of what their business is, I will counter by asking if you have whittled what you have down to a clearly defined product. I’m not saying that you cannot sell multiple things, but they should all be linked by a clear thread of connectivity and relevance. Most importantly, however, having a clear idea of what it is that you sell will inform the considerations that you need to make whilst building a website: If you sell retail items you will need shopping cart functionality. If you sell consultations you will need a booking calendar. If you sell creative services, you will need portfolio features. If you sell construction equipment, you’ll need inquiry forms. As you would suspect, the list goes on, but the point is that before your site can put you in business, you first have to have a clear idea of how your site will be used.
Who Are You? (What are You About)
Though I literally mean, yes, who you are, I am more so asking what are you about. What is your business’ character? What are the beliefs and principles that make your business more than this atypical, mechanical, “entity?” Knowing the answers to these questions beckons to the type of customer that you wish to reach: If your customer is formal, then your business should be formal. If they are colloquial, then your business should be colloquial. While your business should have human characteristics, this doesn’t mean that your business should relay traits that you, or your community, might deem to be unbecoming. It does mean, however, that anything your business communicates should be as intentional as who you intend to reach. Nobody’s business should relay the characteristics of a shitty person—unless it specializes in reaching shitty people.
Just as much as who you are can encompass these areas, it also involves exploring how you are unique. No matter what you sell, someone else is selling it—this applies for legal services, medical services, app developers, restaurants, design firms, fashion labels and many other types of businesses under the sun. Opening up shop in a particular industry is not enough to garner the attention of customers, especially in an age when customers are increasingly promotions-resilient.
Something about your business, at the end of the day, has to be unique. Everybody sells clothes. Everybody sells food. Everybody makes websites, or shoots video. What is it about you that will make people’s eyes perk up? Is it an industry focus? Is it a location? A production technique? Is it a type of customer service experience? Or are you simply offering something that someone else is offering? And finally, how do you reconcile these uniquities with what your personality is, and how you deliver your product? While the answers to these questions may inform the stylistic considerations for your website, they are also the core, existential, answers to questions that will eventually be faced by your brand.
How do you communicate? (Pictures/Videos/Podcasts? Are you a writer? Etc.)
Maybe you are like me, and enjoy plucking away at a keyboard for a few hours on a Saturday morning of blogging. Maybe you’re someone who prefers taking pictures, shooting informational videos, or gabbing away on a podcast. Though almost all websites today are built on some type of a blog foundation, the irony of websites today is that not everybody blogs. At its core, blogging is a type of content creation that favors strengths in one type of skillset—writing. Additionally, blog posts are a type of content that favors one scope of strengths—reading. This means that if you or your customers lack either of these strengths, creating content and regular updates to your site can be onerous for not just you, but also your prospective leads… And if there is one thing that I know about creating content—it’s that if it is difficult, or unenjoyable, to make, you probably won’t make it. Thus, understanding how you communicate speaks to the ease with which you will be able to update your own website. If you don’t like to write, there is no point in building a site that favors lots of writing features. If you don’t like to be on camera there is no point in building a site that favors a video blogging format. Inversely, if you do like these things, then pursuing features that favor clean and efficient podcast updating, seamless video integrations, or beautifully presented articles should be your main prerogatives
Answering these questions together will provide some foundational guidance to what type of website you should implement, and by extension, how it will serve your business’ marketing and operational functions. Ultimately, however, none of these questions should equate to an answer suggesting that you do not need a website. In such a vein, yes, SquareSpace’s slogan is correct: you are not really in business if you do not have a website. A website is a foundational element to any business’ functions, and should not be ignored.
It is just that as a business, having a sense of directionality to your website’s build can be the difference between an online property that meets your promotional and lead-generating standards, and a website that misses customer expectations, burns your money, and spins its wheels. At this rate, there are far too many examples of business websites which do exactly just that. My advice is this: don’t let that website be for your business.
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