Is the YP Website Builder a Good Solution for Small Businesses? Common issues with using YP.com

In a world that now seems very far away, businesses once had to rely on the Yellow Pages for advertising. In fact, Yellow Pages had a distinct advantage over these businesses and could, in a sense, strong arm them into paying pricey fees to secure listings in its pages.

Of course, as we all know, the Yellow Pages' relevance waned as the world of digital took hold. Over the years, fewer and fewer businesses saw any benefit to paying to advertise within these books when most people were searching for businesses online from computers, and eventually from mobile devices.

With that in mind, Yellow Pages (split over several companies yp, dex media, super pages, etc) shifted its focus to digital and rebranded as YP. YP's strengths have always been in the realm of sales and marketing. Today, their aggressive sales team is known to push businesses to first buy ads, then upsell them to website creation, an entirely new realm for YP.

Not surprisingly, for a company not known for its tech prowess, the website builder being sold by YP is not state-of-art from a technology standpoint. The good (or bad - depending on how you look at it) news is that customers won't have to build the website themselves, YP handles the building process.

The bad news is that although they don't overtly state this, most YP companies outsource the building of their websites, which means support is a constant issue. Customers are not getting the personalized attention they deserve. The website they are then given is really little more than a digital sign, a page with little to no actual functionality, business operations ability, or customer engagement.

Basically, once a team of salespeople push to upsell potential clients to build websites, they then outsource the actual work and become disconcertingly hands off.

Typically, customers are then locked into one-year contracts that are famously difficult to escape. Not surprisingly, there are widespread reports of customer dissatisfaction.

The Solution

Rather than trust the creation of their website to a company that doesn't actually specialize in website creation -- much less small business website creation -- and that outsources its work, can pose a real threat to small businesses.

The truth is, your online presence is invaluable in generating new leads and conversions, and keeping you in contact with existing customers.

The good news is that a website building solution exists that eliminates the stress of managing a website building tool on your own, but offers a world of small business-centric features.

Small business owners can opt to use a platform, like Ocoos, when building their website.

A platform is basically the underlying technology on which your website runs, which is managed behind the scenes: its technology is kept updated and supported without you having to do a thing.

The Ocoos platform gives you the option to incorporate an interactive calendar onto you site, schedule appointments, accept payments, create maps, and manage customers without needing third-party apps. The technology already exists … on the platform.

Thanks to the platform remaining up-to-date with tech standards, your site will always be optimized for search engines, browsers, and hand-held devices -- even as technology changes in the future.

Plus, Ocoos offers a patented B2B recommendations engine that helps connect the websites of partner businesses, which can send traffic back-and-forth between the two -- for instance, a golf instructor and a sporting goods store.

With Ocoos, hosting and e-commerce tools like interactive calendars and appointment schedulers are included, and critical business tools like CRM tracking abilities are also available through the platform.

The struggles of building and maintaining a website using a DIY website builders are also removed and the work is never, ever outsourced, since Ocoos's personalized concierge service sets up the entire business website based on an initial consultation. Owners are then given access to the site, so they can update the content as they wish. In addition, 24-hour, US-based support is always available.