| Yellow Pages - Red Face |
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| Thursday, 22 March 2007 | |
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After two years of growing the company, mainly by word-of-mouth, this time last year I decided that we might be able to expand our local customer base by advertising in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong - embarrasingly so. We have had precisely five calls. None of those people were doing anything more than trying to find out general pricing.
To be honest, I should have been smarter after seeing that the "webdesign" category contained only half-a-dozen listings. I can see how the Yellow Pages might be useful for plumbers, electricians, taxis and pizza restauraunts, but I wonder when the last company found a webdesign firm through the Yellow Pages? Around 2005 probably.
I think our poor returns from the Yellow Pages can be explained not only by the popularity of onlice search, but also by the fragmentation of the webdesign business. Is it possible for a company to make it as "A Website Company any more? Does every web firm need to specialize in order to survive? I believe so. Here at Alledia, around 90% of our customers are looking for a Joomla or Drupal website and the all find us online. The number of people who call the office looking for "A Website" falls every year. Nowadays, even many technological novices know enough about websites to know what niche they're looking for.
So what do you think?
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Comments (1)
  written by Shirley, April 25, 2008
Sure. Web companies can survive as generalists if you are creating sites for the individual or small business. But if you plan on taking on larger projects, you definitely have to be a generalist. Clients who are looking for developers for larger projects know exactly what they want and are indeed looking for specialists.
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Today saw the end of something that has bugged me for a whole year - our Yellow Pages contract. Wow, that's an expensive, useless heap of nothing for a webdesign company.
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