Thirty-eight thousand students arrived in Tuscaloosa this month. Most of them will find where to eat, get a haircut, fix a laptop or buy a gift the same way: they will type something into a phone and take whatever comes back first.
This is a series about the businesses that come back second, or not at all.
What this is
I am a student at the University of Alabama and I build websites for small businesses, which means I spend a lot of time looking at how independent shops appear online. The pattern near campus is consistent enough to be worth writing down: a business that has been here for fifteen years, that everyone over thirty knows by name, is functionally invisible to a freshman with a phone.
Not because it is bad. Because it has a Facebook page from 2019, a Google listing nobody claimed, and no website, and those three facts together mean it loses to a chain three miles further away.
Each piece in this series covers one business: who runs it, how long it has been here, what it actually does well, and what a student trying to find it runs into. I am not selling anything in these pieces, and a business does not have to be a client to be in one. Several will not be.
Why I am writing it rather than just noticing it
Two honest reasons.
The first is that this is the thing I am studying. I am a psychology and data science student on a pre-med track, and the part of data science I keep coming back to is how people actually search for things versus how businesses assume they do. A storefront is a small, legible version of that problem.
The second is that I run a company that builds websites, so I have an obvious interest here and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What I can promise is that the reporting comes first: if a business is doing fine without a website, that is what the piece will say.
If you run a business near campus
I would like to feature you. It takes about twenty minutes, in person, at your place. I will ask what you do, how people find you, and what has changed since the students came back. You get a written piece about your business either way, and you are under no obligation to buy anything.
Reach me at (205) 462-7839 or elijah@purcell-ventures.com.
What is coming
The first pieces are being reported now. If you want to follow along, the rest of the series will appear on this blog, and campus events and openings show up on UA Today, which I also built.