Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute, and today we're talking about why that friendly freelance web designer you hired probably stopped returning your calls. We're also going to unpack exactly how that disappearing act is currently costing you customers and creating serious financial liability for your business here in SLO County. It's just the most common and honestly the most frustrating story we hear from small business owners. It doesn't matter if they're running a winery in Paso or a little boutique shop in San Luis Pisco. Right. The lack of support, the sudden silence, it feels so personal. But the reality is that this problem is systemic. Systemic? Yeah, it's built right into the very structure of the freelance web industry. So if you're wrestling with a half finished site or maybe a launch site you just can't get updated. You really need to understand you are not alone. And that frustration, it's rooted in a broken economic model. Okay, let's unpack this because I think everyone can relate to this experience. You hire someone, the project starts with all this enthusiasm. Maybe you even get the site launched and then just silence. You send that simple follow up email, hey, can you change my holiday hours or update a staff photo and you just get nothing. A digital ghost town. So why? What's driving that? Well, it almost always comes down to economic pressure. Not rooted in this disappearing act or ghosting as people call it. It's epidemic. It's that common. What's huge? Across the entire creative industry, we looked at the numbers and a survey found that a staggering 72% of freelance creatives have been involved in a ghosting scenario. And well, you know, clients can ghost freelancers too. The volatility really runs both ways. The designer often becomes a victim of their own unsustainable business model. And that model is what ultimately makes them disappear. So we're shifting the conversation away from like individual character flaws and looking at the structural issues. What are those core pressures that lead a designer to just go dark? The main pressure is just instability and that breaks into three major factors. The first one is simply being overwhelmed by volume. Most freelancers, they don't have a stable salary to income, right?
[2:03]
So they operate in this feast or famine cycle. When the work is there, they feel this intense pressure to say yes to every single project that comes through the door, just to build up a cash cushion for when things get slow. So you're saying they're stacking projects like cordwood, just hoping to get through the winter. Exactly. They stack them up until they're completely buried. They'll start five projects, maybe they finish two, and then suddenly they're just grounding in deadlines and emails and everything else. Right. So now you get a picture of that designer trying to climb out of that hole. When your email arrives asking for a quick fix on a site you paid for six months ago, well, that's just another thing piling up. It's the easiest thing to ignore when they're scrambling to finish a new $5,000 project that they need to pay their rent. So they prioritize the new paying work and your request, the old request, just sinks to the bottom of the inbox. It just sits there until the silence becomes permanent. That makes perfect sense. They're focused on the next paying client, which I guess leads us right to the core flaw in the system, doesn't it? That one time project fee. It does. That leads directly to the second, and I would argue the most damaging issue. The project-based model is fundamentally broken for any kind of long-term support. How so? Think about the transaction. You paid a large one-time fee to have the site built. It was a product sale. Once that final check clears, their financial obligation to you is for all intents and purposes over. Every phone call, every maintenance request, every little tweak you ask for after launch is effectively unpaid work for them. So they're actively disincentivized from keeping that relationship going. If I call my designer from a taskadero and ask them to spend, say, 45 minutes fixing a photo gallery that broke, they're not just losing 45 minutes of time they can't bill for. Right. They're also delaying finding their next big project. Precisely. They're actually penalized for being helpful. If they spend that time on your site, they're pulling income directly away from their future. The whole business model is basically structured to say, build it and flee.
[4:05]
There's no incentive for them to be your partner only your builder. And you mentioned a third factor, one that goes a bit deeper than just economics. It's about why some designers vanish from the industry entirely. Yeah, it's the Burnout factor. Freelancing can be incredibly volatile and frankly very isolating. That same industry survey found that 71% of freelancers dealt with late payments. Wow. I mean, can you imagine the stress of constantly chasing down money you've already earned? On top of that, 45% reported their mental health actually declined over the last year. These people are under intense, intense pressure. Many of them just reach a breaking point and they go get a stable full-time job somewhere or they just, they leave the industry altogether. So when our local central coast business owner tries to reach them, the designer hasn't just decided to ignore them. They might have actually left the business completely. Your old website project just becomes irrelevant to someone trying to reset their career and, you know, their mental health. That is often the harsh truth. It's less about malice and more about self-preservation or just industry exhaustion. But look, regardless of the designer's motivation, the result for the small business owner is exactly the same. A beautiful website that is now abandoned, unsupported and increasingly dangerous. And that's the pivot we have to make, right? We need to shift the focus from the, you know, mild annoyance of being ignored to the genuine financial liability that an abandoned website creates. This is where it gets really interesting because this isn't just bad customer service. This is actively costing you money. Absolutely. The cost is really threefold. Let's start with security. That's the hidden time bomb. Your website is software. It's running on a server. And just like your phone or your computer, that software constantly needs updates. We call it patching or maintenance, but the analogy we like to use is simply keeping the doors locked. And if the designer is gone, nobody's locking the doors. Nobody's locking the doors exactly. WordPress, which is the platform most small business sites use, it needs security updates weekly, sometimes daily.
[6:09]
If your site hasn't been touched in six months, those doors are wide open. And the data shows that 43% of all cybertax target small businesses because they're the low hanging fruit. They're the low hanging fruit with outdated, vulnerable platforms. So what does a cyber attack even look like for say a local business and Grover Beach? It's not usually some grand data breaches it. It can be. It could be theft of customer data if you're doing e-commerce. But more often hackers will just hijack your website. They'll use your legitimate business site to distribute malware or they'll inject spamming malicious links. And then suddenly Google flags your website as dangerous. It blacklists you. Oh, that's bad. It's terrible. Yeah. Now instead of customer seeing your menu, they see this giant red warning page that says this site may harm your computer. The downtime and the cleanup can cost thousands and the damage to your reputation is severe. That's a huge quantifiable risk that just gets worse the longer the site is abandoned. But okay, even if you avoid a hack, the second cost is this constant subtle drain on your business lost credibility. And this one is immediate. And it is brutal. We're talking about the impression you make in milliseconds. 75% of consumers admit they judge a business's credibility solely based on its website design. 75%. Yes. So if your site looks like it was built in 2018 and it hasn't had a single refresh or if a contact form is broken, that instantly signals neglect. And the speed of that judgment is just it's astonishing. There really is. Users form an opinion about your business, your trustworthiness, your professionalism within 0.05 seconds of landing on your website. Less than a blink. Less than a blink of an eye. If you see wrong information, a clunky design, pixelated images or worse, a copyright date that says 2022, they assume you don't care about your digital storefront. And if you don't care about that, why should they trust you with their business or their money? So if security is the catastrophic failure and credibility is the steady bleed, then the third and ultimate cost is the direct loss of paying customers.
[8:16]
The research on this is so clear. A massive 88% of online consumers will not return to a website after having a bad user experience. They don't give you a second chance. They don't call you tell you the link is broken. They just click away and go straight to your competitor. Okay, let's make that concrete for someone listening who runs a local service business. If they check their Google analytics and they see a really high bounce rate, what does that actually mean? It means the reservation form for your massage business in Pismo Beach is failing. It means your restaurant's seasonal menu link is dead. The customer needed something immediate, something essential and your abandoned site failed them. That 88% statistic means they didn't just decide to wait. They went to the business across the street. Your abandoned website is actively diverting revenue to your competition. So when the business owner realizes the site is a security risk and a credibility killer, their natural reaction is fine. I'll just take it over myself. Yeah. That seems logical, especially for a resourceful small business owner, but that DIY approach, it often leads to a whole new set of headaches. Oh, the DIY trap. It is so difficult to navigate because it's usually preceded by complete lack of documentation. When freelancers vanish, they rarely provide the logins, the hosting location, the admin passwords, none of the critical info. They were paid to build the product, not to write the manual. So now you're stuck trying to figure out if your site is on GoDaddy or Bluehost or which one of the 50 passwords on some sticky note is the admin access. It's like a digital archeology project. It is, and it gets even worse when you try to make a change. See, freelancers often use these obscure custom plugins and very specific code snippets to get a certain look. So you try to change one small thing like you upload a new higher resolution photo and suddenly the entire layout just breaks. Because that custom piece wasn't built to anticipate a normal user making a simple update. Exactly. And get this. Even when small business owners do have all the necessary information, 64% of them still find updating and maintaining their website's challenging.
[10:23]
Without documentation, it's virtually impossible. And it takes hours of frustration away from actually running your business. And the consequence of all that difficulty is often just tragic and expensive. You realize you can't fix the mess you inherited, so you end up paying a new developer to just rebuild the whole site from scratch. You're paying twice for the same website. It is the highest expression of that frustration. You paid a large upfront cost for a product. And that product failed not because it was poorly designed at the start, but because there was no ongoing service built around it. The money you spent was an investment in something incredibly fragile. So what is the actionable advice for a business owner here on the Central Coast who needs a reliable digital partner? How do we future proof our web presence and avoid getting burned again? You have to fundamentally change the model you're looking for. Stop focusing on a one-time transaction, the product. Start looking for an ongoing relationship, the service. You need a provider who has a clear financial incentive to keep you happy month after month. So the designer needs to be motivated by earning my business next month, not just by caching that big check from last month. That makes the ongoing maintenance a core part of their profitability. Absolutely. When maintenance and hosting and support are all baked into a recurring monthly model, the provider's income depends on your satisfaction. They have to stick around and they have to deliver. It creates a truly symbiotic relationship where their success depends on your website being secure, up to date, and actually generating leads for you. That structural shift is key. And there's another piece of advice you mentioned that's particularly important for our community here in San Luis at Bispo County. It is. The second critical piece is to choose local accountability. Look for someone whose business is built right here in the 805. Someone local, maybe right here in a royal grande, is much harder to ghost. Their entire reputation depends on word of mouth and our tight knit community. Right. If they vanish, their business dies. It does. That built in pressure ensures they value the long term relationship.
[12:23]
When you hire local, you're investing in a partner, not some anonymous freelancer who could be anywhere in the world. It makes the service personal again. You're not just an IP address. You're their neighbor. Precisely. And the third step, which you have to do before you sign anything, is maintain control of your assets. Ensure that you, the business owner, own the domain name registration, you control the hosting account, and you own all the content. Why is owning the domain and hosting so critical? It's your emergency exit. If for any reason the relationship's soures or the provider does vanish, you need to be able to independently point your domain name. Your digital address to a new service. It gives you immediate leverage and control. It guarantees you are never held hostage by a disappearing partner. And this brings us full circle to that managed service alternative, which directly solves all these problems we've talked about. The incentive issue, the security risk, the DIY trap. Yeah. The managed difference is really the antidote to that broken project model. Instead of paying that huge upfront fee, $3,000, $5,000, and then just hoping the designer returns your call six months later, the monthly service model is built on earning your trust. The fee is lower, it's predictable, and it includes all the critical stuff. Hosting, security updates, and crucially, all the support and content changes you need. They have to earn that business every single month. It shifts the risk entirely away from the small business owner and puts it on the provider. They have to stick around, they have to deliver quality, or they lose their income. It's really the only reliable way to ensure continuous care for your most critical digital asset. It truly is. It ensures your website is always secure, always reflects your current business, and is always ready to capture that 88% of customers you otherwise lose. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At UGRO.Pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update, forever all, for just $79 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract, and it is strictly month to month, so there is zero risk. We're local here in AG, and we can have you live in days not months.
[14:32]
Want to see what your site could look like? Go to UGRO.Pro right now, and we'll design three custom mockups for your business. Completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening, and keep growing.