Never Stretch the Truth When You Have a Counter on Your Website
For some reason just about everyone who has a website loves to brag about the number of hits they get to their site every day. If you’re a small business or home office person it’s not the number of hits you might get to your small business site that matters. It’s the amount of money that you make from those hits that is the real bragging point.
So numbers don’t impress us much at all and what impresses us even less is someone who wants to brag about the number of hits they’re getting when it’s obvious that the number is more than just a little inflated. When we come across people like that it tends to make us a little wary of doing business with them.
Just today Toni was talking to a small business person who wants us to do some work for them and he was trying to impress her by telling her that he was getting 600 hits a day to his website. The only problem is that a counter on his site shows that he has had 1121 visitors since October 2005.
Counters that are visible to casual site visitors are counter-productive (no pun intended) and visible counters have no place on a small business or home office website. They rarely have a positive impact and they can have a negative impact that you might not expect.
July 28th, 2006 at 11:13 am
That’s a pretty funny story, but unfortunately it’s all too common. I’d be willing to bet that nearly everyone who runs a website inflates their traffic numbers when talking to others. But getting back to your point: yeah, there’s no reason for a small business to have a visible counter on the site.
July 28th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Even more sad Bill was the fact that this guy didn’t have just one counter - he had three - and this is a guy who supposedly has a million dollar idea and wants to engage us to help him get it off the ground.
His idea sounds great and there is a real need for it in this town … but it now worries me that his aspirations far exceed his ability. We just don’t have time to waste on something that is never going to work.