Local bike shops suffer from the same problem as all local businesses. These types of business have small staff, small reach and run on shoestring budgets. In addition, while highly knowledgeable about their niche market, they tend to have limited knowledge of things like marketing, branding, advertising and design.

This lack of marketing savvy usually results is horrible web sites. Most local business have no site and an industry has popped up to take advantage of this fact by hijacking searches for local services with crappy yellow page aggregators.

Those local business that do bother to build a site usually throw as little money and attention at it as possible. You can’t blame them, they have enough to deal with just keeping the shop stocked and servicing existing customers. Often you hear about hiring someone’s nephew or a local college kid to build the site as practice. The local business owner often doesn’t know if what they get is good, and just take the output form the kid and consider the “problem” solved. This site launches, and then ages…. quickly.

Check out my local bike shop, Pegasus. The design is adequate, though dated. The biggest problem is that the content is miserably old. The promotion on the homepage calls out an event on February 10th. I wonder if this is even February in a different year. Why would I say this? The ride schedule is for 2006.

uRBDO is different. This “cycle and mountain supply” store based in Kirkland, Washington has a simple, clean and current site. There’s really not much to the site, which is good. Maintaining your site is not the primary job for you as a local business owner. Keep the content minimal and there’s less to worry about updating.

uRBDO has community information and resources which makes them act as a good neighbor. Again, there’s not much here, but that’s okay. There’s enough to show that you care, but not so much that it’s a burden to maintain. They also have a blog, which offers a simple means to provide updates and news to customers. Task someone (maybe the owner) with uploading a product photo or writing a small story once or twice a week.

I was really attracted to the design of their contact page. Nothing extraordinary, but I’ve never seen this layout of an embedded Google map before. The typical mini-map (useless) is much larger and as interact with either it or the full-size map, the other reacts as well. I think that the lat/long is a little uneeded, but maybe they understand their local community enough to include this.

You can tell that the owner of uRBDO really gets design by clicking through photos of the shop. For example, check out the custom neon OPEN sign.