You're Thinking About Your Website All Wrong!(Part 1)

Still thinking of your website as just an online brochure? Or maybe a digital business card gathering virtual dust? You’re not alone—and that mindset could be costing you. In this episode of Between Two Creeks, we’re flipping the script on how business owners should actually think about their websites. No fluff—just straight talk about what your website should be doing (hint: making you money), and how to turn it into your hardest-working, 24/7 salesperson. Ready to give your site a serious upgrade in mindset and performance? Let’s get into it.

James: Hi everybody I'm James, Creative Director and Founder of Twin Creek Media.

Dennis: I'm Dennis Powers. I'm the Director of Business Development here at Twin Creek Media.

James: Yeah, and we have a cool show for you today.

Dennis: Yes, actually it's titled "Hey Business Owners, You're Thinking About Your Website All Wrong." Why did you call it that?

James: This is a really important topic. It comes up all the time, and it's really how people think about a website. I think most people—at least 51% of people out there—are thinking about a website in the wrong way. There are lots of examples of what a website isn't. So, Dennis, what's a great example of what a website isn't?

Stop Thinking of Your Website as a Brochure or Business Card

Dennis: Well, it isn't a business card, so it's not just there for contact info.

James: Yeah, which in the early days, at the beginning of the internet, that's what people did. They put up a one-page website. It was almost like a Yellow Pages directory—name, address, phone number, and things like that. Those things are critical, obviously, but not the be-all and end-all, and you should not think of your website as just a business card. Similarly, you should not think of your website as just a brochure. That's often another thing people get stuck on. It's like, "Oh, I need some photos, video, maybe some text." That's in the print world, where you would hand someone some information. Like, if you're at a trade show, you have a brochure about your products or services. Although there are some similarities, it's so much more than that. A website needs to be way more dynamic—we use that word in the industry.

Dennis: I still get calls saying, "Hey, I need a brochure site."

James: Really? Do they actually use that word?

Dennis: Yeah!

James: That's interesting. We'll get to what a website actually is in a second. But it's not just a brochure, that's for sure. It's also not an expense. People think of a website as a pain-in-the-butt, necessary-evil business expense. That's such a wrong way to look at things. It's not an expense because it generates money—or it should. This is the whole point. Unlike, say, insurance—you have to have an insurance policy for your business—or you have to buy tables and chairs for your office, those things are expenses. They don't produce income. They don't produce revenue.

Your website—when people are thinking about redoing or updating it—often want to spend as little as possible because they treat it as an expense, not as an investment into a tool for your business that's going to crank up growth. That is really the nugget here. The key takeaway—one of them—is your website is a salesperson.

Dennis: Yeah, 24 hours!

James: Yeah, which takes us to the next point. How you should think about your website is this idea of your website being a salesperson. In fact, it's one of the best employees you could ever hire. That concept of treating your website like a salesperson—or a really important employee, a key employee in your company—is really powerful, because it sets the stage for this mindset. It's not about how cheap you can build a website, or getting your neighbour’s sister’s cousin’s best friend’s ex to build a site on the side while they're going to school.

We've all been there when we're starting a company or absolutely flat broke. But when you're more established in business, you need to reframe your thinking and really understand that a website is a business tool. You should be thinking about how you can get the most out of it. What you put in is actually relatively small. We'll get into some costing at a later point, but it's interesting that your website has the ability to produce a lot of money. It's surprising when you start measuring it—and we do, as a marketing agency. We measure what's going on and how much revenue is being created from business websites.

Dennis: And you see the results...

James: You see the results. You have to be measuring the results. That's another key thing. Lots of people actually don't know. They're like, "Well, my website must be important. I don't want it to be broken." But it's broken or has lots of dead links or broken images.

Dennis: Because they've left it to the last minute, viewing it as an expense.

James: Exactly. It's not. Your website has a super important job. What are some of the jobs your website has?

First Impressions Matter: Trust, Education & Conversion

Dennis: Obviously, it's there for a good first impression, and to meet and greet potential customers.

James: Yeah, exactly. Sometimes it's the very first contact people have. They may click on an ad, a link, a directory, social media, or just Google your business or services. They don't know your business name yet. But they land on your website, and it's amazing. You have five seconds to subconsciously impress that person. Five seconds. 

It's also the squint test—when you squint at a website, what are you seeing? What are you getting out of it? Can you still get the gist of it when you squint? It's a funny thing we do in the industry. But in five seconds, people are already subconsciously making up their minds. Am I in the right place? Is this business for me? Can I trust these guys? That’s very important. The meet-and-greet first impression.

Building trust—we’ve identified that already—is a huge issue. It’s almost like a salesperson too. First impression: "Hey, how are you doing? I'm James." Then what you say after that, your stories, eye contact, body language, how you're dressed—it all starts to build trust and rapport. Just like a salesperson, the website's job is to educate and inform. Let people know about your products, your services, your business, and what you've done in the past. Give them reasons to trust and believe in you. It's like, "Yeah, this is the company I want to do business with. I want to buy from them, hire them, or partner with them."

Dennis: They can really help me.

James: Yeah, exactly. Part of that education, informing, and trust-building is all, in the end, to help you achieve your goals—which are usually money-related. But if you're a non-profit or charity, it doesn't have to be. It could be about reaching enough people with your message to hit your organization’s goals. Maybe it's selling tickets to an event or fundraising—or signing people up, raising awareness for your cause. It's often financial but doesn't have to be.

Your website needs to convince and sell. We call that conversion in the industry. Ultimately, you want your website to hand off that website visitor to a person—a human being. At this point anyway. We're not quite where AI is fully doing everything. I hope that never happens in our lifetime. But Dennis is actually a robot—he’s just very convincing. We had a lot of makeup to cover the rust patches on his face. Your website is like a sales office. People come in the front door, and your website goes, "Hey!" One thing leads to another, and then they say, "I’d like to introduce you to someone in the organization."

Dennis: Yes!

James: It's almost like the salesperson's job. That's why we wrap this idea around the concept of a website being a salesperson.

Dennis: Another thing when we talk about results—and we’ve been able to track these—is that handoff can be very good compared to other methods. I've experienced it firsthand. The lead that comes in after they’ve spent time with your virtual salesperson, your website—gone through that education and informing process—and then reached out to you to do business, that handoff can be very, very good.

James: It’s because they've already learned so much, and had a good experience. Their first impression was good. They've built some trust, and learned about your products and services and company. Now they have specific questions for a person, but the website has done the pre-sell. It’s a pre-sales tool.

Now, it's important that while we're talking about all this, you're building in this idea of—okay, it's a salesperson—but you need to know what your salesperson's doing. So if you hired a salesperson, Dennis, what would be some of the very first things you would establish with that new employee?

Dennis: Sort of what their activities would be. The volume of activities that are necessary or required.

James: So you're getting to KPIs and metrics, right? You're establishing, okay, these are your goals for your salesperson, and these are the metrics and numbers that we're going to be measuring and watching to know if that salesperson is hitting targets.

Dennis: Right!

James: Wow, imagine if you applied that same thinking to a website. Most people don’t. They just go, "Yeah, I don't know. We'll hope for the best. We built our new website, it cost a million dollars," and go! They cross their fingers and hope for the best. Maybe it didn’t cost a million dollars—maybe it cost $500 because they went for the cheapest possible do-it-yourself deal or your brother or sister’s cousin’s girlfriend. So yeah, I mean—your brother’s sister’s—that would be... I’m bad with those metaphors. I shouldn’t use those ones. Sister’s brother-in-law’s cousin—that would have been a better one. I’ll correct that next time.

You Don’t Buy a Website—You Invest in What It Can Do

James: So anyway, this kind of gets us thinking, and we're going to continue the salesperson metaphor. One of our most popular questions of all time is, "Hey, I'm just shopping around for a new website. How much does a website cost, by the way? I'm just looking for quotes." They almost start the conversation that way. We get phone calls, we get emails, and they boil down to: how much does it cost to build a website?

Wow, that is a loaded question. There are different ways we answer this sort of thing, but I often say, "Well, how much does a car cost? Or how much does a house cost?" I mean, they're all over the map. You can spend very little money, you can spend a lot of money. What's the point? What are your goals? It all comes down to: what is the business trying to achieve?

Dennis: And what do you want the website to do?

James: Yeah, so we don’t really even answer the question with something like, "Oh, it’s $5,000" or "Oh, it’s $25,000." Actually, "a website costs $50,000"—those are ridiculous answers. We can give fuzzy ranges perhaps, but it all comes down to: what do you want your website to do and accomplish? And also, what are you going to get out of it?

Plus, the website is just an initial cost. Going back to the salesperson metaphor—lots of salespeople are paid a base salary plus commission. They also need ongoing support and education. You send your salespeople to training. You give them information to use. You build tools for them—maybe they need brochures, PDFs, videos, case studies, or things to hand out at trade shows. The salesperson is important, but they also need support and tools to do their best job. Your website is actually similar and needs ongoing maintenance.

Your Website Is Never "Done": Why Ongoing Content, SEO, and Social Proof Matter

James: So you have the initial cost of building or upgrading your current website, making it as good as it can be. But it really needs ongoing support in terms of the same sort of tools a salesperson would need: great videos, great photography, good information—things to download, things to sign up for. "Get on my email newsletter," or "Watch my video, watch my podcast." "We have this top 10 checklist—grab it here." These sorts of things.

Dennis: Successful client stories too.

James: Exactly. Successful client stories or product reviews. Show some evidence and proof that people love your stuff. Whether they love the service you provided and give a great write-up and testimonial with a photo, or it’s a product review: “This product is so good.” 

It doesn’t matter what the product is. It’s really important that people see that other people love your stuff.

Dennis: Yes!

James: It's called social proof. We talk about that with customer testimonials, video testimonials, Google reviews, ratings—all sorts of things like that. Those are very important tools for your website to have as well, but often they’re ongoing. You need to keep adding to it.

Dennis: Yes.

James: Your website doesn't launch and then stay under a rock. It actually launches, and then you shine a light on it and send lots of people to your site. But it needs all those tools and ongoing updates—new articles, new blog posts. We talk about Google—Google is a giant matchmaking service. All it's trying to do is match what someone's looking for with a company that provides that. That’s it.

So, you as a business owner or marketing person need to be thinking about how you can get on Google’s good side. If you impress the socks off Google, Google will refer you to other people.

Dennis: Yes.

James: And it’s called ranking—ranking high on the results pages. But that’s a whole science in itself. It needs ongoing content, ongoing effort, creating new information and posting new stuff, and knowing the techy side of search engine optimization as well. Getting some nerds involved—not just people who design cool stuff, but nerds who actually know what the pieces of code mean, the tags, and the tips and tricks of the trade.

Dennis: The speed of websites. Speed.

James: Speed is a huge thing.

Dennis: Yes. And the user experience.

James: Right. User experience. How things look on phones. We’re going to get to some stats later, and that’s a really interesting thing. The number of people using websites on their phones—they don’t even see your website on computers anymore. That’s a cool thing too.

What’s a Website Worth? Think ROI, Not Just Price Tags

James: Getting to the cost of a website—so, if we talk about base salary, what's a good salesperson salary? I mean, there's a huge range.

Dennis: Yeah—$50,000?

James: Fifty grand. I know some salespeople who make a lot. One guy showed me his T4—I don't know why—but he said, "Look what I made last year." It was almost $300,000. I was like, "Nice. That's more than I expected."

Websites are generally far less than that, especially for the mid-size companies that Twin Creek Media works with. They have a budget of maybe $15,000 to $30,000. That’s the average range of a business website for the class of company we’re working with—mid-size companies with 10 to 50 employees. But these companies want a website that looks amazing. We build something like that, and then we feed it every month with new stuff. The website evolves and grows over time. But the buy-in to the concept of your website being a salesperson is what we need to get across first.

Otherwise, all you're trying to do is build the cheapest possible site. No one thinks of it as a salesperson. They’re not thinking about the output. They’re just thinking, “Let’s spend as little as possible,” and that’s completely the wrong idea. If you spend the bottom dollar for a site, it’s like hiring the most junior, inexperienced salesperson on earth.

Dennis: Yes.

James: It’s like, “No, I’m looking for the lowest price.” All right—you’re going to get the worst salesperson, who will perform the worst, and sell the least. If you look at the ROI of that, it doesn’t make any sense. Because if the difference between a $50,000 salesperson and a $100,000 salesperson is 50 grand—

Dennis: Yeah.

James: —but the output may be a lot more.

Dennis: And would you want to put that junior, low-cost salesperson in front of a potentially really good client?

James: That’s another thing—do you really want that to be your first impression? Aren’t you selling yourself short?

Dennis: That client has questions that the junior salesperson doesn’t have answers to. Maybe your website doesn’t have answers.

James: That’s right. So again, it's an interesting thing. The cost—the initial cost of the site—is almost, I wouldn’t say irrelevant, but it’s not nearly as important as you think. Spend what you need to so your output is going to be ten times what you put in. We'll get to some examples later on, but it is an absolute drop in the bucket. A $20,000 website is a drop in the bucket in terms of what it outputs for the business. We’re talking millions per year.

Dennis: Yeah, four or five years!

James: It's ridiculous. I can't understate this. We track so many different companies' performance in our agency. I can honestly tell you in black and white—the difference between building a site properly and not cheaping out, thinking of it as a salesperson, as a business tool, and spending another 5, 10, 15, $20,000 instead of going with the lowest bidder—it ends up being... I can't even put it into words, but it’s like a 50-times return difference. When you have a $20,000 or $30,000 website produce an extra million dollars, I don't know what that multiple is, but it’s a lot.

Dennis: It's a good investment.

Your Website Launch Isn’t the Finish Line—Keep Measuring, Adapting, and Investing for Growth

James: Yeah, it's a good investment, absolutely. So the idea that your website is really just a starting point is another very important thing. When you're talking about building a website—and this is where the title of the show comes from,

“Hey business owners, you're thinking about your website all wrong”—it's because people think it's a one-time exercise. Getting in shape is not a single race. You don’t sign up for a 10k run and say, “I'm going to get in shape. I'm going to do this 10k run. When I cross the finish line, I'm done. I'm in shape.”

You know this perfectly because you're a trail runner. You know how much effort it takes to get in shape.

Dennis: Yes.

James: I have good intentions about getting in shape as well. But we know it’s a journey. Life is a marathon, not a race—whatever the metaphor is. The website is the same thing. When you launch a site, that’s the beginning.

Dennis: Yes.

James: That’s really only your first workout.

Dennis: And you’re looking at those statistics. You're asking, “How was that workout? How was that run?” You know, “I ran 5 kilometres and it took me 45 minutes. Could I do it in 30 minutes next time?” You can view your website the exact same way.

James: Yeah, and it gets better and better. Higher performance. As your website gets more in shape—with the right optimization strategies—, it gets more productive and more efficient.

Dennis: Yes.

James: Investing in your website as an ongoing activity and treating it like an ongoing exercise and investment into your business is investing directly into the performance of that site—which is going to grow your company, bring more clients in the door, or sell more things on your site if it's an e-commerce site. There’s so much you can do.

So we're going to show a list of things—actually, all the different sources of traffic that could possibly go to your website (see images below). We’re talking about advertising. Your site is going to rank, and people are going to land on it organically (we call it) directly from Google. But you’re not left to the mercy of Google. You can send people directly to your site as well. Because your site is going to be more effective—just like a salesperson would be—if it has more people to meet, right? If I have one person a day, I’m like, “Hey Dennis,” but what if you were Dennis and then John walked in the door, and then Judy, then Jen, and then Chris, Adam and Roger?

Dennis: Or like sending me to a trade show or something like that.

James: Totally. Yeah. You've got to send your website to a trade show! I mean, it's the same idea. Let’s double, triple, and quadruple the number of people hitting a website through all these different advertising activities—like ads, social media, and increased organic rankings. All sorts of things we can do to build website traffic.

Our average campaign—when we turn it on—is two, three, four, five, six times the previous volume of visitors. This is just what happens. So when you do that, of course, you’re multiplying the number of leads—

Dennis: More people!

James: Way more people.

Dennis: And it can be targeted, and they're actually people who are interested in what you have to offer.

James: Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good point. You're not just waving a flag out there on the side of the road like you see in some cities. Which is fine for pizza shops because most people driving by eat pizza—they definitely eat food. Apart from Dennis, because he's a robot!

Part 2 is coming soon—featuring real-world examples of business and e-commerce websites, plus key strategies to drive serious traffic and growth. You won’t want to miss it, so stay tuned!

Check out our previous podcast episode on: The Best Marketing Tactics for 2025

“Between Two Creeks” is Twin Creek Media’s weekly podcast series. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify. If you enjoy listening to the latest and wonkiest in marketing every week, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button! If you want us to amp up your website or marketing strategy, contact us and let’s chat!