> some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank).
I don't think Joey's Pizza is going to have a web presence if not for Facebook. I don't think they should have to hire a developer or use the latest no-code platform to just throw up their name, location and address on the web. It's centralized, sure, but its free, simple, SEO optimized and as a user I'd prefer that to some home-spun website.
There are issues with Facebook, but people who hate on it tend to try to make everything an issues. And having Joey's pizza on Facebook and it being unavailable for a few hours every decade or so is not a big concern. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of web presence that Facebook addresses. Other websites and apps are still going to exist as long as regulations don't neuter the competition as would invariably be the case.
Joey's pizza did have a web presence before Facebook. Facebook is "the latest no-code platform". If Joey's pizza can get an actual, physical "Joey's pizza" neon sign constructed, they can make a web page. Let's not kid ourselves - it's extremely easy. People were doing it in their bedrooms in the 90s.
> Joey's pizza did have a web presence before Facebook.
My recollection is that far fewer businesses had any web presence in 2004. Big professional ones did, but random family-owned restaurants usually didn’t.
Facebook didn't start eating the small business site market until well after 2004. More like 2010 or later.
Some places that definitely would have a site otherwise, don't, but have Facebook instead. Some have a site but neglect it, so if you want current info you have to check their Facebook page. Others had sites and let them lapse because FB took over that role. Hell, the local public schools are like that, too. Have sites, send emails and texts and such, but FB is absolutely the best channel to get school & district news from.
An even more unfortunate trend is the very small businesses that only accept orders by Instagram message. Believe it or not I've seen this at two different local food delivery businesses that I wanted to support but couldn't because I don't have an Instagram account.
That may be dependent on the location. In my country basically every business had an online presence by 2004. They certainly would by now, even if Facebook didn’t exist.
USA (Northern VA, specifically). Most of thee places I dine regularly have a web presence. About half, it's just a simple home page with a pdf menu. About half have some sort of online reservation or ordering platform integrated.
Exactly! They don't have to spend thousands on a super spiffy custom job if they don't want to. These days, if they can pay rent on their building or buy equipment for their business, they can afford a few bucks and depending on how much effort they want to put in, they can put up some basic info on SimpleSite, Wix, the managed Wordpress.com or something similar.
100%. There were/are other options. FB just makes it slightly easier because many business owners already know how to use FB because they have personal accounts. I hate when a company only have FB. I'll take an okay website over a decent FB page.
For at least the past 100 years it has not been a problem to give a person a button or a phone to let them solve any problem with a single press/call (the US and Russia presidents even are supposed to have buttons and phones to exterminate the entire life on Earth). The only thing to consider has always been at what price (in a broad sense, not just money) it came. It still is the thing to consider although this has became less obvious and departed more away from the money part in the cost looking from the perspective of the end user.
Would you mind helping me see the equivalence? Buttons here, or buttons there. Is it the amount of buttons? The size of the buttons?! All I can think of is the amount of people being shown per button.
I can assure you having helped small businesses in todays world that running your own website in the era of nation states battling to set up botnets has dramatically increased the complexity of what this entails today versus in the 90s.
Immediately, when we connect web servers they are pentested and port scanned.
It doesn't really feel any different to me than in the 90s. You would get port scanned then too. Keep your software up to date, and keep a reasonably tight config and you won't have any trouble running a basic website. Especially for something like Joey's pizza just make it a static site and you'll barely have to worry about anything.
I mean for a static site sure, but Joey wants to also have a news feed to post events, specials, and new menu items.
Joey also wants to let customers comment on those posts with questions and general excitement, or to reach out directly in a way that isn’t a phone line.
The issue is that Facebook and IG are really really good business and marketing platforms. That and ads is basically their whole reason for existence. And you get a huge audience, organic discovery, and moderation for free.
Every restaurant in my city’s primary social media presence is on IG. Unless you’re a huge chain and have a marketing department that’s basically all they get that isn’t mayyyybe a local mailing, or a sponsored story in a local newspaper or food blog.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you should have your own website for nothing else other than to lend some legitimacy when people Google your name but if you could only have one I would probably skip the website. “The Web” from a business standpoint is just Google’s centralized platform at this point since the thing that matters is audience and discovery.
Also remember that they are probably going to be setting up a Facebook presence either way (for communicating with and advertising to customers), so the website work is on top of the Facebook effort when talking about level of effort.
Every pizzeria I know has a web site. Every time I want to order a pizza or book a table I just go to their website (or google it up and go) and either use their web UI to select it (if they are big enough to hire an engineer to put it there) or just call them (which I also find Okay, this even takes less time usually). Constructing a simple web page is not hard. Simple shared web hosting is cheap and often comes with a free domain name. There also are totally free hosting platforms (some ad-sponsored perhaps, but this is tolerable and better than nothing), many come with a WYSIWYG constructor (mostly producing shitty code but still Okay as compared to no WWW presence at all). There also are GitHub Pages which give you great static page hosting + news posting for free if you know basic git (and there already are enough of people around who know git and will make you a GitHub page if you just give them a free pizza or two, me included).
You don't even need a website actually, you can just register your business in Google and local competitors (if any, depends on the country) and put your email address (needless to say how easy it is to get for free) there. People will find you via location-targeted search, email/call you and update your rating. I wouldn't consider Google much better than Facebook in this context but at least it's an alternative and let's you share independent contact channels visibly.
> There also are totally free hosting platforms (some ad-sponsored perhaps, but this is tolerable and better than nothing), many come with a WYSIWYG constructor (mostly producing shitty code but still Okay as compared to no WWW presence at all). There also are GitHub Pages which give you great static page hosting + news posting for free if you know basic git (and there already are enough of people around who know git and will make you a GitHub page if you just give them a free pizza or two, me included).
I don't understand how you can type this and then still say you don't understand why people just create a free Facebook page instead. And that is not even touching on the network effect that your Facebook page enjoys.
The pizzeria I use most frequently used to have a website, but it's now either gone or undiscoverable by search. Facebook comes up in search, but it's good deliver services like GrubHub at the top.
The GrubHub result is the most frustrating, because the pizzeria does it's own direct delivery too. And if you get it delivered through GrubHub, or even call the place via the # GrubHub lists, GrubHub gets a fee if some sort.
Google at least still shows their business listing in the right margin of search results though, so hopefully people mostly use that.
It doesn't make any sense for a pizzeria to concern themselves with buying a domain, creating a website; finding a hosting; advertising the website; and maintaining it. The point of FB is being easy to set up, and much more importantly, getting the traffic. Ask yourself, how hard is it to cook, yet how often people are eating out? (pandemic constraint excluded)
A contractor of mine gets most of his business via his FB page, and he knows absolutely nothing about coding. He complains a lot about labor shortage. Imagine he'd have to worry about finding a web developer as well.
Go to one of the many website builder businesses out there, pick a pizza-restaurant template from one of hundreds of templates that they offer, type in the same info they would into FB, put in a CC. Done.
Most of these places offer plugins to take online orders too. Its' $5-10 a month for the standard menu & phone number deal, and a bit of a premium over stripe for payment services (still cheaper than Grubhub).
We are long past the days of small businesses needing a coder to have a website.
If a pizzaria wants business, it makes sense for them to advertise and have a way for people to find them. There are many alternatives to Facebook to help businesses do that, just like there are many ad agencies for them to use to get their ads on radio and TV. Business of course want to keep costs low and FB is (AFAIK) "free" to get started on. But once they get on FB, don't they still need to expand their reach by using Facebook ads? Or is just having a page enough? (I don't use FB so I'm clueless how that works)
This is the real value proposition, Ben Thompson has a lot of good articles on the good and bad of Facebook. Radio and TV ads are expensive because they can only serve one ad spot at a time. Plus, my understanding from friends in advertising is that TV spots can become quite expensive as demand rises. You can get books which tell you roughly the cost of advertising for all different types of media.
Whereas at a single point in time, Facebook can sell many ad spots and allow individuals to target certain groups of people. Unsurprisingly, media thinks you can do very specific ad targeting but you can’t.. not to the level of doomsday-ness that people suggest. They’ve put limits on the min # of people you can target.
It is worth mentioning that FB’s ad bidding system is completely automated, so prices are almost entirely determined by demand and ad spots.
The other side is that, pizza business is not in the business of making a website or dealing with technology. They are in the business of managing a restaurant which is hard work. Anything that takes away technology work can be a huge plus for them, especially if they don’t have to manage it.
When I worked in a restaurant, it would be 12-14 hour shifts. Leadership would do those shifts nearly every single day putting out (non-literal) fires and keeping the ship afloat. You have to pick your battles carefully when running restaurant.
I find it painful when people say.. let’s just go back to the old form of advertising. Old form of advertising highly favored large conglomerates, because the ad spots were limited. Instead businesses had to rely on word of mouth.
But what if you are a small internet business making niche jewelry or whatever? Well, if you only rely on word of mouth you will probably saturate your customer base early. Instead if you could put out ads for your demographic cheaply across your entire country, now you are talking!
Does that mean FB is net good? I think that is up to the individual, I’m not going to tell people otherwise. But there is value there, and everyone should recognize that even if they don’t believe it is net good.
This is because pizza delivery is insanely profitable. Over the past decade, Domino's Pizza has outperformed FB and Google. By a _lot_. They have plenty of incentive to spend on marketing and reachability.
And they have far more leverage than tech does, in terms of consumer preference. Think of it like this: if you want to order pizza, and your preferred pizzeria isn't on Apple Maps, do you order from somewhere else? No, you load up Google Maps instead. Or any of the other dozen replacements for the Yellow Pages launched in the past 20 years. And they all fall over themselves to find and add these places, making it easy to list (just a postcard in Google's case).
You’re never in a new neighborhood with limited time to wander around? Do you always keep up to date with every shop in your local area? There are dozens and dozens of establishments within walking distance from where I live. And yeah, what if you do want to order from a bit further away?
To ask what the point of being on Google is because people can find you by walking seems almost deliberately obtuse.
If Joeys Pizza is only available on facebook then how do non-FB users find out about it? I dont have FB and anytime someone sends me a FB link I get a sign up page and no way to view what is being sent without signing up and logging in.
Assuming everyone has FB is part of the problem. Joeys Pizza doesnt need anything other than a static page with a menu and phone number/address.
So they went from zero Internet presence to "almost everyone". All without paying a dime and from an interface that grandma could use. They do not understand what a static page is. They might not even know the difference between a Facebook page and an actual web page, to them it's still "you can find us on the google".
If Facebook shuts down tomorrow or everyone suddenly starts thinking that it's evil enough to stop using, Joey's Pizza is more likely than not to go to yet another centralized service just like Facebook. You just can't beat free and easy with the open web.
They should have "paid a dime" to establish a web presence. Fiverr and similar sites are widely available. I'd be surprised if one couldn't get a "business card" minimal web presence for $25+several $/year thereafter.
After a certain point, a business must switch from a "graphics design is my passion" style logo to something inexpensive designed by a (semi-)professional to be taken seriously. Why is web presence any different?
> They might not even know the difference between a Facebook page and an actual web page
Yes, this is a problem. I have never met such people though, but I believe they exist.
> You just can't beat free and easy with the open web.
You can make free, easy and open without Facebook.
It's far from impossible to make a nice app which would let you choose a template, some customizations (way more flexible and probably even easier than Facebook at the same time) and put a website on any dirt-cheap shared PHP hosting which supports FTP, SFTP or Git. I could make it myself if I had some time to spare, people would just have to sign-up at GitHub, click and get a page there, and even a QR code to put on their door/cards :-). But even if I made it I doubt many people are going to use it - Facebook is too popular already and it also provides them with an easy way to advertise.
Any (or almost any, perhaps really poor governments exist, I dunno) government can also easily afford to contract a shared hosting provider to give every citizen and every small business a simple web site. This would be a win for the government as they would hugely improve their nation digital independence this way.
When I moved, I found my new pizza places (all local restaurants really, plus my mechanic, where I get my hair done, etc.) by walking around, word of mouth from my neighbors and guys putting menus around my mailbox. Whether these places are on the web anywhere, let alone Facebook, probably has just a small effect of people being able to find them. I mean, if Facebook didn't exist, people would still be able to find them.
I have recently given up on buying food from plenty of places that only supported platforms I wasn't on.
Looks like it was a trendy thing to hop into a platform and turn every other channel off until recently. The worst that I've seen was at the start of the pandemics. But at least around here, the trend seems to have completely reversed. On the last few months I haven't find any place doing it.
Top third of a page has a login/sign-up section. Which means what I'm looking for isn't immediately visible (phone number/menu). And having been to FB and had issues before I no longer longer even click the links. To be honest I can't remember the last time I saw a FB link in my Google search results, it's usually a link someone has sent me
A static website can't be updated trivially with recent news or specials. It also won't have things show up automatically in front of the eyeballs of people who have previously engaged with that website.
You can Google Joey's Pizza and their phone number is listed right there. Also, someone helpfully posted an image of the menu for you, just click images in Google search.
They would, there are lots of local online platforms where they can have an online presence. In my country it's services like TakeAway, Deliveroo, Uber Eats that bring in a lot of revenue for smaller restaurants. If you don't want to hire a developer or local web development agency you can use Wix or any of the other website builders to create a small website for your business. If your company has a recognisable name, it's easy enough to get a fine ranking in Google's search results. I think we'd do fine without Facebook.
Besides the very plausible DIY solution suggested by a sibling comment, Joey's Pizza can go to something like wix.com and pay $23 / month for an account that even lets you accept online payments. Seems like it pays itself if even only a handful people order directly through you rather than via food delivery apps each month.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but... If the question is about having a passible non-FB web presence (without implying on-line ordering) - then Joey's Pizza is almost certainly on Yelp, TripAdvisor, MenuPix, YellowPages, Google Maps, and a whole host of other web sites.
Other sorts of small organizations, which might make FB their main web presence - it'll vary, but generally a "Joey's Pizza" is the best case scenario.
I don't get this. I cannot remember ever not finding a business I wanted to contact because they were only on Facebook and I don't use Facebook. Sure, sometimes I only am able to find a phone number, but you know what, that is a great tool to use to contact a business.
Google already does it for free and it is far more practical than a Facebook (cough, AOL) page.
We just need to again, accidentally discover/create whatever it is that's going to cater to the masses without handing control to a dysfunctional sect of humans.
Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Seznam, DuckDuckGo, Runnaroo (dead but a very successful experiment, I found a number of local business through it, paid them over €100'000 in total and got great jobs done).
I don't think Joey's Pizza is going to have a web presence if not for Facebook. I don't think they should have to hire a developer or use the latest no-code platform to just throw up their name, location and address on the web. It's centralized, sure, but its free, simple, SEO optimized and as a user I'd prefer that to some home-spun website.
There are issues with Facebook, but people who hate on it tend to try to make everything an issues. And having Joey's pizza on Facebook and it being unavailable for a few hours every decade or so is not a big concern. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of web presence that Facebook addresses. Other websites and apps are still going to exist as long as regulations don't neuter the competition as would invariably be the case.