By Gary Titmarsh
Every so often you get a reminder that "website problems" aren't one thing. They're not even close to one thing.
This month we worked with two businesses. Both needed a site rebuilt. Neither needed the same fix.
Giggles Photography is a pop-up portrait studio. No shopfront, no fixed address, different location most weeks. The one thing a customer could actually rely on was finding them online, and that broke when a GoDaddy subscription lapsed without anyone noticing. The fix wasn't a bigger website. Giggles doesn't need a site to do the selling, the personality and the bookings already happen on Instagram and Facebook. It needed a small, honest site that looks like Giggles and sends people straight to where the business actually lives.
Common Ground Maintenance had the opposite problem. Garth built his reputation years ago partly through a WordPress blog, posting results and proving he could deliver. It worked. He's now busy enough to choose his clients rather than chase them. Somewhere in there a plugin broke the homepage and visitors started landing on the blog instead. He never got around to fixing it, not because he stopped caring, but because the site had stopped mattering the way it used to. He was just paying to keep a broken version of an old stage of the business online.
Neither of these is really a "website problem." One business needed something simple that pointed people elsewhere. The other had outgrown what it built years ago and just needed something that matched where it is now, with the option to bring the blog back later if he wants it, no plugins, no login screen, just a text file and a quick update.
The pattern we keep seeing: the right website isn't the biggest one or the most feature-packed one. It's the one that matches what the business actually needs at that point in time. Sometimes that's more. Usually it's less.