6 ms·

> 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

by bko 5y ago

> 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.

dTal 5y ago
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.
- quaintdev 5y ago
  Its 2021 and one should be able to deploy websites in one click from their mobile phones.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    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.
    - johnisgood 5y ago
      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.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > 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.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    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.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      Interesting. Do you mind saying what country?
      - alistairSH 5y ago
        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.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - handrous 5y ago
    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.
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  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.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  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.
  - lftl 5y ago
    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.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - electricEmu 5y ago
    Funny, nmap was released in 1997.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  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.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Building a website or app is easy. Getting people to use it is another. Every time I order food the restaurant puts a flyer in there begging me to use their own site. Meanwhile "Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up Grubhub in a $7.3B deal".
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  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.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Just to reinforce this point, here are 3 mom-and-pop pizza places off the top of my head. All of them have a website: https://palermospizzamenu.com/ https://palermospizzamenu.com/ https://www.michaelsitalianrestaurantdelimenu.com/ https://www.michaelsitalianrestaurantdelimenu.com/ https://goldengateindian.com/ https://goldengateindian.com/
qwerty456127 5y ago
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.
- 101008 5y ago
  Where do you live?
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    In Europe.
- efdee 5y ago
  > 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.
woudsma 5y ago
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.
anonu 5y ago
So shifting Joey's Pizza's presence from a social network to a website just shifts the power from Facebook to Google. We cant win!
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  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).
celticninja 5y ago
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.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  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.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > 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.
  - 5y ago
datavirtue 5y ago
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.
gjvnq 5y ago
They still should have an email address though and almost certainly a phone number even if only for Whatsapp and SMS. Even for small business that have nothing to do with tech, it is important to have redundancies.
comeonseriously 5y ago
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.
airstrike 5y ago
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.
bell-cot 5y ago
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.

by bko 5y ago

dTal 5y ago

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.

quaintdev 5y ago
Its 2021 and one should be able to deploy websites in one click from their mobile phones.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  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.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    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.
School-Cotton 5y ago
> 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.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  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.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    Interesting. Do you mind saying what country?
    - alistairSH 5y ago
      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.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- handrous 5y ago
  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.
stephenhuey 5y ago
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.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
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.
- lftl 5y ago
  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.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- electricEmu 5y ago
  Funny, nmap was released in 1997.
merrywhether 5y ago
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.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Building a website or app is easy. Getting people to use it is another. Every time I order food the restaurant puts a flyer in there begging me to use their own site. Meanwhile "Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up Grubhub in a $7.3B deal".
AlwaysRock 5y ago
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.
tdeck 5y ago
Just to reinforce this point, here are 3 mom-and-pop pizza places off the top of my head. All of them have a website: https://palermospizzamenu.com/ https://palermospizzamenu.com/ https://www.michaelsitalianrestaurantdelimenu.com/ https://www.michaelsitalianrestaurantdelimenu.com/ https://goldengateindian.com/ https://goldengateindian.com/

qwerty456127 5y ago

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.

101008 5y ago
Where do you live?
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  In Europe.
efdee 5y ago
> 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.

woudsma 5y ago

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.

anonu 5y ago

So shifting Joey's Pizza's presence from a social network to a website just shifts the power from Facebook to Google. We cant win!

qwerty456127 5y ago
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).

celticninja 5y ago

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.

mixedCase 5y ago
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.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > 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.
- 5y ago

datavirtue 5y ago

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.

gjvnq 5y ago

They still should have an email address though and almost certainly a phone number even if only for Whatsapp and SMS. Even for small business that have nothing to do with tech, it is important to have redundancies.

comeonseriously 5y ago

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.

airstrike 5y ago

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.

bell-cot 5y ago

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.