Do you need a custom website or is a Facebook page enough?

The honest answer first

If you're a one person operation, your customers find you by word of mouth, and you aren't trying to grow, a Facebook page is enough for now. I'll say that out loud even though I build websites for a living, because sending someone a bill for something they don't need yet is a bad way to earn a reputation in a city this size.

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What changes the answer is one thing, and it comes down to whether you need to be found by people who have never heard of you, regardless of how big you are.

What a Facebook-only presence actually costs you

Think of a social page as a stall at a farmers market. The market brings the crowd, the table is cheap, and you can be open by Saturday. What you don't get is a door of your own. The market decides the hours, the layout, which stalls are near the entrance, and whether the whole thing moves across town next spring.

That's the real cost, and it shows up in three practical ways.

You can't control what people see. Reach on a social page is decided by a company that changes its mind regularly and doesn't explain itself. A post that reached four hundred people last year might reach forty now, and nothing you did caused it.

You don't build any search presence of your own. When somebody in Kingston types your trade plus the city into Google, the results are mostly websites. A social page can appear, but it's competing on someone else's terms and it carries none of the credit back to you. Everything you post makes the platform stronger, not your business.

And you're stuck inside the templates. Booking, quoting, a real price list, a gallery organized the way your work is actually organized, a page for each service so each one can be found on its own. None of that fits in a profile designed for everybody from a bakery to a band.

When a Facebook page is genuinely fine

There are real cases where I would tell you to stay put.

• A seasonal business with a full customer list and no interest in more.
• A shop whose entire trade walks past the window.
• A side business you're still testing, where the point is finding out whether anyone wants it before you spend money proving you're serious about it.

There's also the in-between, which most people miss. A Google Business Profile, which is free, plus a tidy social page, will carry a very small local business further than either one alone. If you aren't ready for a site, that's where I would put your next hour.

The tipping point

You'll usually feel it before you can name it. It shows up when you start typing your prices into messages over and over. When a customer says they couldn't find you and you realize they'd gone looking in a search engine while you were still only living in a feed. When you want to be found for the thing you do, not just the name you already have. When the platform changes something and a month of your reach evaporates, and you notice you have no other way to reach anybody.

That's the point where a website stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the only piece of your marketing you actually own.

Tell me about your business and where your customers come from right now, and I'll tell you honestly whether a site would earn its money yet. If the answer isn't yet, I'll say that, and I'll tell you what to do instead. If cost is what is holding you back, what a website costs in Kingston lays the numbers out plainly.