Before I left my ex company, I was talking to one of our vendors about why it was important to have a website for his business. He’s a typical Chinese educated business man and quite old fashioned.

It’s not like he didn’t know what the internet was, it’s just that it never crossed his mind to set up a website for his business, as he would scout out prospects on his own, even though he’s the owner of a medium sized business. I told him that the Internet would help people find him, rather than him always looking for prospects on his own.

As an example, I showed him on my computer what would happen if I searched for his service on Google. I typed in ‘printing services’ and limited the search to only websites in Malaysia. I browsed with him through the first 10 links to see if any of the names of the businesses were familiar and lo and behold, he found the name of a competitor of his, which was just down the street from his factory.

Currently, 60% – 70% if his business comes from my ex company, which we told him is a very risky thing to do, because if for any reason we no longer printed paper products, he’d lose almost all his business in an instance. Hearing this, he finally set up his own website (United YL Printers).

I’ve recently emailed him asking if it’s brought in any extra business, but I am a bit doubtful. The main reason for this is that the site is mostly flash and the text on the site seems to be from a .jpeg or picture file. Both make the site very non search engine friendly as technically, there is zero content on the webpage. Upon further checking, I’ve realized that he’s not listed on yahoo.com either, this could help bring in even more visitors to his site if he had submitted to yahoo.

I’ll let you know what his reply is and hopefully I can give him some advice into improving his search engine ranking (if he wants it).