Most businesses here already have a website, built once by a nephew or a template service or someone's cousin who does design, and then left alone. The hours drift out of date, a phone number changes and nobody updates it, and two years later it's a page nobody visits.

So when the subject comes up the answer is usually that they already have one, or that it's not really a priority right now, and that's a reasonable thing to say. They were told a website would bring in business, they got a website, and no business came, so they concluded that websites don't do much. Most agencies treat that as something to talk them out of, but the conclusion is fair enough. A website genuinely doesn't bring anyone business on its own. It's one part of a chain that runs from someone searching, to finding you, to believing what they see, to actually picking up the phone, and if any part of that is missing the rest of it doesn't matter. Most businesses in Saint John have the one part and assume they have the chain.