A print agency came to us not long ago. Good business, real work, real clients. And when it came time to show us their current website, the conversation slowed down the way it does when someone’s about to show you something they’re ashamed of.
“I don’t even want to show you.”
They showed us. The photos barely matched what they did. The site was old — years old — and they couldn’t get anything changed. But the thing that came through loudest wasn’t the site itself. It was the feeling. It made them feel inadequate. And the other stuff didn’t matter nearly as much as that.
When the Mess Becomes Who You Are
The neglect had been going on for so long that they’d almost grown accustomed to it. If that’s even possible.
It is. You see it with people who have messy rooms or messy homes — after a while, cleaning no longer becomes a priority because that’s who they are now. The mess isn’t a problem to fix anymore. It’s just the way things are. And sometimes with old websites, it becomes part of your identity. Not in a good way and even talking about working with a boutique company like ours was a difficult step.
That’s what had happened to this print agency. The site wasn’t something they were working on fixing. It was something they’d stopped seeing. The embarrassment was still there — it just went quiet. It showed up every time someone asked for the link, every time a potential customer landed on the homepage, every time they thought about it for half a second and then looked away.
That kind of shame doesn’t get louder over time. It gets heavier.
The Business Cards That Said Everything
Another client — same story, different shape. They didn’t put their website on their business cards. Didn’t mention it. Didn’t send anyone there. The site was out there just as a last resort and it wasn’t ‘I’m too small for a website’ it was ‘I can’t imagine anyone seeing this, it’s awful.’
Think about that. A business owner with a live website who actively steered people away from it. The copy was okay. The photos were okay. But the design was terrible, and that was enough to make the whole thing something to hide rather than something to use.
They’d been sitting in that embarrassed limbo land for over five years. Every month paying more than what we charge. And the site still wasn’t something they could show anyone.
How these companies keep these clients is beyond me. I don’t get it.
The Part Nobody Talks About
Here’s what you’d expect: someone who’s been cringing at their own website for five-plus years finally sees the new design, and it’s this big emotional moment. Relief. Excitement. “Oh wow, this is so much better.”
That’s not always what happens.
You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl. It’s the same kind of thing. The shame doesn’t just lift because the site changed. It’s such an interesting reaction — it’s not what you would expect at all. It’s completely bass-ackwards.
The people who’ve been embarrassed the longest are sometimes the quietest when the new site goes live. Not because they don’t see the difference. Because they spent so long being the person with the bad site that they don’t quite know how to be the person with the good one yet.
That part takes longer than the build. And that’s okay.
Yeetish Question
What if I’m embarrassed to even show a web designer my current site?
Good — that means you care about how your business looks. We’ve seen sites that haven’t been touched in five, six, seven years. The conversation always starts the same way, and it’s never as bad as the person thinks it’s going to be. The site is the site. What matters is what happens next.