“Do I really need a website?”
I get this question from time to time and my answer is always, “Yes!” – not because this is my bread and butter, but because I really believe that you do. Yeah, the Internet is full of all sorts of very useful tools and social media is, no doubt, a powerful way to reach your customers, but your website always needs to be the central hub to what you do online.
Eventually, believe it or not, your favorite social media platform is probably going to go away or become less effective. Look at the list of the ones that have fallen to the wayside – Yahoo Groups, Friendster, MySpace, Google +… The list goes on.
And speaking of Google, they will kill a service in a heartbeat. There’s even a new site that lists sites and services that Google has cast to the side. I used Google Reader every day and still haven’t found anything as effective to replace it. They also recently killed Inbox in favor of the Gmail app, which just does not quite have the same function.
When Google kills something, it has a larger impact. Some of the services they roll out instantly become the focus of online marketing and thus required for us to compete. It’s frustrating and costly to implement these things sometimes only for Google to cast the service aside which is why I’m hesitant to recommend those strategies to local clients on limited budgets.
Maybe we’ll all learn one day.
Link: Killed by Google
Photo by Thomas Young on Unsplash