Small Business Rundown

Ep. 89: How to Create a User-Friendly Website

• National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) • Season 4 • Episode 89

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Creating a user-friendly website is key to building trust with customers and supporting growth for small businesses. NFIB member and small business owner Vince Wondra explains how small businesses can leverage their resources to create accessible websites and develop their online presence. Senior Attorney with the NFIB Small Business Legal Center Rob Smith discusses Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) website accessibility considerations and how small businesses can avoid becoming a target of predatory website accessibility lawsuits. 

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SPEAKER_00

Show it to your friends and tell them be brutally honest. Go to a family member. Be brutally honest. How hard is my website to use? And tell them I want you to be as brutal as brutal can be. And hopefully they will tell you. It's not easy for us as a web agency to tell that to our customers, but usually if they're coming to us, they suspect there's a problem.

SPEAKER_02

The Small Business Rundown is the official podcast of the National Federation of Independent Business, the member-driven voice of small business. Every two weeks, a new episode offers resources for small business owners and information on relevant laws and regulations. NFIB and our members advocate to keep U.S. small businesses strong and independent in Washington, D.C., all 50 states, and the nation's courts.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Small Business Rundown. This is Adam Temple, NFIB Senior Vice President of Advocacy, and today we'll discuss how to create a user-friendly website and why an effective online presence is important for small businesses. Joining me is Vince Wander, a small business CEO and NFIB member, who's going to shed some light on how he recommends small business owners think about an online presence for their business. And we'll also hear from Rob Smith, a senior attorney with the NFIB Small Business Legal Center, who has some insights for us on the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it relates to small businesses websites across the nation. Vince and Rob, thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00

Hey, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_01

Vince, let's start with you. Can you just give us a brief overview of your small business and what you do, what a normal day looks like for you?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. I run a company we're called the BBS Agency. We've been around since 2013. I've actually been building websites since they became a thing. Three decades of it makes me feel really old. Um in the course of this, we've been through all of the internet trends and changes, the browser war, the rise of the mobile web, and everything else. And through it all, I've always helped businesses and with my own agency. We help businesses increase their visibility online, get more leads, and drive more sales. Now, sometimes that's a better built website. Other times it's search engine optimization, doing digital marketing for them. We do build websites. That is a core function of what we do. You need to have a good online store, good online storefront. But at the end of the day, you want more leads and you want more sales. That's why you have a website. And so we want to make sure that's what our ultimate goal is. We're driving those leads and we're driving those sales to your company.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and apparently a lot of small businesses are listening to your advice according to a survey that NFIB conducted in 2025. 82% of small businesses do have their own website. What are the benefits of creating a well-maintained website? You mentioned sales and leads, but what are some of the other ones?

SPEAKER_00

So they're all kind of cover different things. So, on the technical standpoint, a well-maintained website is a website that is patched, it is secure. It keeps your customers' data secure, it keeps your stuff secure. So I have an IT background as well. So when somebody says that, like my first thought is, is it safe? Is it secure? We want to make sure that stuff is there. Other aspects of a well-maintained website, and this is my definition for well-maintained, and this is an optimized website. Your website has to be easy. And that's a refrain we use all the time. Back when I was going to school, it was the KISS principle. Keep it simple. If it is easy for somebody on your website to answer what I call the who and the four what's who are you? What do you do? What does your product or service do for me? And then what do you want me to do next? If those are obvious, they land on that landing page, the home page, and they can go, oh, I'm in the right place. You're going to solve my problem. And now I know what I need to do next. They're going to go deeper in your website and they're hopefully going to reach out to you and hire you. If you can answer those on all those main pages, you're doing a really good job. That is a good designed website. Now, other aspects of this are in keeping it simple. And some of this isn't keeping it simple for you as the business owner. It's keeping it simple for your audience. How simple is it for them to find what they're looking for? How simple is it for them to learn about what your service is and what you do and what the benefits are? How simple is it for to get social proof? Do other people like your product? Do you have reviews embedded on your website? Do you have good descriptions of what your products are and your services are? All of that to the end user makes it really simple for them to know they're in the right place, learn about what you do or sell, and then make it simple for them to reach out to you or hire you, hire you or buy whatever widget you're selling. And if you keep it simple for that end user, you're going to have a successful uh online marketing and business strategy. Easier said than done, but it's about making it easy for the people to do it.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Vince, can I ask you a question on that point? I mean, your experience, uh, how many, if you can quantify it, would you say actually apply that principle or are simple enough and user-friendly?

SPEAKER_00

That's a really good question. I would say honestly, maybe only 20 to 40 percent. And part of that is a lot of companies, particularly small businesses, they try to self-do it themselves. And if you're too close to the problem, you don't see the forest for the trees. Because you understand your service and your offerings. You're looking at your website going, This is amazing. I can figure out what I'm looking for. I totally understand this. And you might be using a bunch of insider terms, terminology terms, things that your target audience maybe doesn't know. So by working with an outside agency, they come in with a fresh perspective and can, if they're doing their job, they should be looking at the usability of your website, going, is this simple? Does this logically make sense? If I'm on this page and you're spouting some sort of claim, is there a link to where I can go prove that that claim is true? Like if you're talking about we're top-rated, well, where's the link to the reviews? I want to see those linked to the reviews. If our product does X, Y, Z, where's the proof? Are there reviews from customers saying that? And so you kind of need that outsider perspective. And if you want to still self-do it, show it to your friends and tell them be brutally honest. Go to a family member, be brutally honest. How hard is my website to use? And tell them I want you to be as brutal as brutal can be. And hopefully they will tell you. It's not easy for us as a web agency to tell that to our customers, but usually if they're coming to us, they suspect there's a problem. And that's where we can kind of come in and we can help that aspect of things.

SPEAKER_01

And when that happens, Vince, do you usually see folks start from scratch and build a new one? Or are there ways to improve what's already there?

SPEAKER_00

More often than not, if your website was built, say within the last 10 years, it's probably easy to modify what you currently have. Chances are, if you're a small business, a real good chance your website's built on WordPress. It is still a really good content management system platform, primarily what we work on. You don't need to start from scratch. Your content is still there. Now we'll probably do a redesign and we're gonna help you redo your content because content is gang. And it's one of the things business owners hate to do on their own websites. Let's say we were building a website from scratch, business owners usually don't want to pay for a writer. They're like, no, no, I'm gonna skimp on that. I can write about my own company. And what the reality is that's the worst homework assignment they've ever gotten.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_00

You've been in school, and when you were in school and the teachers would give you an assignment, there were always those ones you'd be like, oh man, I don't want to write about this. And if you're a business owner and you're asked to write about yourself, you're probably a perfectionist about it. And you're gonna write it and you're gonna agonize about it and you're gonna rewrite it, and you're gonna ask other people and you're gonna procrastinate. And then when you eventually do it, you're not gonna be happy about it. Because if I ask you about your company, you're gonna talk my ear off. Oh, we've been around for so long, we've had all these great success stories and everything else, but it's really hard to put that to paper. So we really encourage people to work with outside people, work with writers. This is where AI comes in handy. It can really help take your message. You can spew everything you want to it and help you get that content across on your website so people understand what you do, why you're passionate about it, all those other things.

SPEAKER_01

And it's interesting you bring up AI because the research that NFIB's done, we recently had a technology survey and it showed that small businesses are tending to lag behind larger competitors. Do you see that gap narrowing?

SPEAKER_00

No. If I honestly I see it widening these days, and here's why. I could talk for hours about AI. It is incredibly powerful, incredibly versatile, and it gets better all the time. We we leverage it. It is a force multiplier. You can use it to do the work of 10 people very easily if you once you start playing around with it. And that is frightening to a lot of people out there. Frankly, I think there needs to be more regulation on it. When we started with the internet, when when we had computers, computers created all this processing power and we started to see what the heck the future of that looks like. And then when the internet came up, now all these things are connected to each other. Well, then we have the mobile web. Now all that knowledge is in your pocket. And now with AI, we're now entering the age of the doable web where all those things that came before it lets you take those thoughts and do more with it. And large companies have embraced that before everybody else, and they are moving at the speed of light. And small business owners, because you're too busy doing your day-to-day job, you're too busy building a new building, you're too busy doing somebody's paperwork and accounting work and being a lawyer and running your hair salon and running a restaurant, and you're too busy to dive into that. So those big companies are going further and faster, and small businesses are kind of being left behind because they're not embracing that yet. And it's scary, it is very scary. You're looking at this new technology and you hear all these things. If you watch the Super Bowl, every commercial seemed to be about AI.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, there were no financial services commercials or truck commercials, which was weird. It was all about AI, and everybody's kind of dipping their toes into it when and when you start playing around with it, you start seeing what it can do and go, oh wow, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And you start diving down those rabbit holes, but you don't really have a direction, don't really have a course, and you're you can get caught up, but the big companies are doing it 10 times faster. And so that's why it's really important for small businesses. Start playing around with AI. Install Claude, install chat GPT. We prefer Claude, but both are good. Perplexity, any one of them, Gemini, co-pilot, go to it and type into the system. You got to prime it, act like an AI expert. Tell me, my name is whatever. Here's my company name, here's the link to my website. So it can kind of learn a little bit about you. Tell me how AI is going to affect my industry, and tell me what I can do to take advantage of AI to grow my company. And then sit back. And it will tell you exactly how AI is shaping to affect your industry, how much it's going to, and then it will start giving you suggestions on how you can leverage it and you can start drilling that down. And that is the best way for everybody to get started because it's going to affect every business a little bit different. And it is the one way that you can, as a small business, start to narrow that gap because AI is out of the box. Pandora's box has been open. It is not going back in that box. A quote I like to use is going, well, is AI going to take your jobs? No, people who know how to use AI are going to take your jobs because that one person can do the job of 10 or 20 people. And that is a blessing and a curse. Because to me, this is this is what computers always kind of were destined to become in some capacity. Like if you ever watch like the old Star Trek episodes, Star Trek the Next Generation. Jordi would walk into the engineering bay, computer, I would like you to run analysis of X, Y, and Z for me. And the computer would just do it. He didn't have to sit in front of a computer and input stuff because now he can move into the decision-making process. And that's what AI is letting us do. You can go to AI and say, here's all this data, these spreadsheets. I need to make sense of it. Help me find these trends. And in a few minutes, you have all those answers, which would have taken you hours or days to manually do before. So it lets us get to the doing phase faster, which is the fun phase.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And with regards to websites specifically, what's your prescription? Does AI play a role in enhancing or feeding content to or any of those roles that your website plays?

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Now there's also a lot of AI slop out there. There's a lot of tools that you and another thing to remember is AI is a tool, it is not a magic tool. Right. And so a tool in the hands of an expert will do significantly more than a tool in the hands of an amateur. For example, you give me and a carpenter all the hardware, best of best tools. You guys got two months, build yourselves a house. I'm not an expert carpenter. At the end of those two months, I have a leaky lean to with no electricity or plumbing in the corner. And the master carpenter's got a lovely two-bedroom house. He's sitting inside watching TV, sipping a margarita. That's because an expert's using the tool. So when you're doing a website, there are tools to design a website to create the pages and they work really fast. And we use these tools all the time. But if you don't know what you're doing, you can have a good-looking website, and then you're going, Why am I not showing up on Google? Now I want it to connect to something else, and I don't know how to connect that piece into it. Right. So the best use of AI for a website, and this is where you kind of where the knowledge piece comes into play, is you can use it to help you with your content and organize your thoughts. Like we use it when I talk to a client and we're interviewing about what they want their website to be. We take the knowledge from that recorded interview and we feed it into our AI prompts, and it will help me quickly put together what the new site map should look like and what the project plan should look like. For business owners, they can use AI to really help them write their content on their website. And honestly, it's one of the things ChatGPT is really good at. You can go, like mentioned before, writing your own content for your website. It's the worst homework assignment ever. Go to ChatGPT or Claude, tell it, act like a professional writer, help me turn my thoughts into an effective about page. And then turn on the voice mode and just tell it about you and your company. Tell it everything about I started this company in 2013. Here's my mission statement. Here's what I want to do. And it will help you write that as content. That's where the doer aspect of AI. You have all those thoughts in your head, but if you actually wrote them all out, it would take you hours and it would be the next incarnation of war and peace. AI can take that and condense it down into hopefully an effective about page and get that messaging across. Yeah, AI is really good, and there are tools available to help small businesses market their website and their business with social media. You can now record videos and their AI tools that'll automatically format them and publish them for you. That's a force multiplier. Because before you would have had to shoot the video on your phone and edit it and upload it and write the content with it, post it to TikTok and then post it to Instagram, post it to YouTube. And now all that stuff can be mostly, if not all, automated. That's one of the best uses of AI for small business owners when it comes to their website and marketing themselves content and doing social media posts. Be cautious with doing the image generation because yeah, it's a great way to get good images, but after a while, a lot of AI images all look the same. And so, unless you have really good branding, so yours look different than everybody else's, they're just more stock images. It's just more stock images type stuff. The best images you're gonna do on your website, honestly, pull out your phone, take pictures of you, your team, and your staff of your products and your you doing your services. Like if you're a plumber and you're under a sink, ask them to take a picture of you while you're under the sink. You know, calling your stuff in. Because honestly, if you're a small business owner, particularly for a service provider, people are hiring you. That pictures they see on the website should be the people who are coming to their door, you know, and that uh builds up a lot of authenticity and a lot of trust right off of the bat. So be cautious with those AI images because anybody can do them, not everybody can be authentic.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And I think to your point, trust is such an important factor. You want to make sure that you preserve that at all costs.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Trust is the golden currency of what I do because I have clients all over the United States. And I live in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which is an hour from Milwaukee. People don't meet me face to face. So they meet me virtually just like we're meeting now. And that trust, we cannot damage that trust ever because this is how they meet me. We got to build that up. It's harder to build up through text exchanges and emails and meeting like this. So you build it up and you cannot sacrifice that trust. And the same goes for your customers. If you say something, you're gonna do something, definitely deliver on it. Better to underpromise and over-deliver than vice versa. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

And we'll be right back to hear more about how to make your website ADA compliant from NFIB Legal Center Senior Attorney Rob Smith.

SPEAKER_02

In a big win for small business, the federal government recently committed to alleviating the privacy and cybersecurity concerns threatening Main Street from a law known as beneficial ownership information reporting. But the fight isn't over. The Federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has stated they will destroy the database of U.S. small business owners' personal information that was recently collected. But Main Street needs that action to happen quickly. Small businesses are calling on Congress to act now and fully repeal the dangerous beneficial ownership reporting mandate. Take action online at protectsmallbusiness.org and tell lawmakers to repeal the invasive and unconstitutional beneficial ownership reporting law for small businesses.

SPEAKER_01

All right, I'll I'll shift gears a little bit over to ADA, not to be confused with AI. And Rob, the Americans with Disabilities Act, it's a far-reaching act, but for the context of websites, can you tell us a little bit more about how ADA affects websites?

SPEAKER_03

So to clarify for everyone listening, ADA talking about Americans with Disabilities Act, a little bit of background. It was passed in 1990. So we're talking about a law that predates the internet. It obviously predates AI, it predates social media. So we got to go back to 1990. And we got when we're talking about websites, we have to think about what were they when they passed this law in 1990, what were they thinking about? What were they talking about? What were they envisioning when this was an issue? And obviously they weren't thinking about the internet because it wasn't, you know, like I said, it predated the internet boom. So there are different sections within the ADA, but part three applies to public accommodations. That's the phrase that the bill uses, which is basically just any private sector business that holds itself open to the public. So for the purposes of this podcast and our listeners, all of them would be public accommodations. And what it mandates is that those facilities make themselves accessible to people with disabilities. And disabilities is broadly defined. Anything that you can think of as a disability would likely be included. So there's really no point in thinking, you know, about that definition and what may be included, what may not. It's just easier to define that broadly. So that's pretty much the mandate. Is part three applies to businesses, public accommodations. And the issue that we see with websites, now bringing it up to this conversation, is because the act was passed so long ago and nobody considered websites at that time because the internet wasn't a thing. Nobody currently knows how it applies to websites. That that question hasn't been answered. It can be answered by Congress or the Supreme Court, and neither of those institutions has chosen to answer the question. The text of the ADA says nothing that would imply that it applies to websites. The definitions for public accommodations only lists public places that will be brick and mortar businesses. If you go through the text, you you can't even suggest, oh, well, there's this part of the definition that may be like a website. No, none of none of that exists in there. It's all brick and mortar businesses. So that lends to the confusion. So courts have come out with different decisions. Some have said that websites aren't public accommodations. Others have said that because of how closely related a small business or any business website is to the business itself, it is a place of public accommodation. The Department of Justice within the executive branch has taken the latter approach. They have for a long time now said that websites do count as places of public accommodation, which means that business owners need to ensure that people with disabilities can access their website and use the website to the fullest extent that anyone that may not have a disability can use the website.

SPEAKER_01

And as a result of these conflicting decisions and lack of definition, do you feel like small businesses are particularly targeted when it comes to lawsuits over whether or not their website meets this special accommodation requirement?

SPEAKER_03

Absolutely, 100%. And unfortunately, that's that's the landscape we see today. We get a lot of inquiries from small business owners about them facing lawsuits, uh, them being targeted. And it is unfortunate because the answer is in flux. There's no solid answer we can give them right now because, as I mentioned earlier, the institutions that can answer the questions are not, specifically as it relates to websites. But yeah, what's happening is there are people specifically that are targeting small businesses. And these are people that may have disabilities, and these are attorneys who are looking for work and easy money. And what these people do is they partner together, the individuals and the attorneys, and the individuals sit at home, they go on the internet and they look up websites. They spend all day trying to find websites that may not be accessible, that may have problems. And then when they identify a website that they think may have an accessibility problem, they work with these attorneys and they file a boilerplate complaint. It's the same complaint, the same lawsuit over and over and over again with the same plaintiff, the same attorney. 90% of the text of the complaint is the same. They just swap out the business owner's name, the business name itself. They swap out, you know, a few references to what part of the website was inaccessible, and they file it in court and they sue the business owner. And, you know, as just one example, there was a Supreme Court case a few terms ago that was ADA related. It didn't specifically address the ADA website question, but the plaintiff in that case was what we call a tester, one of these people that just scoured the internet for websites. And the Supreme Court itself, in that opinion, recognized that the individual had sued, and this is a quote, hundreds of hotels because she focused her efforts just sitting at home, looking on the internet, and she even looked for hotels that she had no intention of ever visiting. And that's that's really you know the point here is with the internet today, it doesn't have to be someone in your local community that that may come and visit your business. It doesn't have to be someone that is going to your website because they actually want to purchase a product. If your business is in California, someone in Maine can sit in their home, look at your website, and sue you because it may not be accessible to them or they think it's not accessible to them.

SPEAKER_01

And what are they looking for on the website itself?

SPEAKER_03

So there's a lot of things. You know, there's a lot of, as I mentioned earlier, the definition of disabilities is very broad. So we're talking about anything from physical disabilities to mental disabilities. So there would be too much to cover here with the time we have. But the NFIB Legal Center does have a guide to ADA website accessibility. And it's a free guide. You can find it on the NFIB website. And in that guide, we have detailed the ways that small business owners can update their websites to ensure that these plaintiffs and these attorneys, who are repeat filers and testers, don't find the reason to sue that they're looking for. So if people want to go and download that guide, they'll see summaries of the requirements that they need to follow to ensure that their websites are as good as they can be. And that's part of the problem, Adam, is not only have Congress and the Supreme Court not identified whether the ADA applies to business websites, nobody has set an exact standard for what an ADA compliant website exactly is. Nobody wants to do that because then they're setting guidelines, they're answering that ADA question. So there is some lack of clarity on exactly what you have to do to be an ADA compliant website as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and we'll include a link to the manual that you mentioned in today's show notes. So before we move on from that, as far as the severity of the situation, what kind of penalties do small business owners face?

SPEAKER_03

Very steep penalties. This is not something to play around with. A first-time violation of section three of the ADA, which applies to public accommodations, can result in a penalty of up to $75,000. For repeat offenders, that can be $150,000. Now, those figures are a bit old. So adjusted for inflation, a first-time offender is looking at a potential fine of $115,000 as of 2024. I think was the last time they adjusted for inflation. Repeat offenders, we're talking about close to a quarter of a million dollars. That's just penalties. None of that takes into account the costs if they get sued, court costs, attorney costs, any damages that a court may award. I talked to a business owner a couple weeks ago who was in this situation. She was facing a lawsuit relating to the ADA, and we were talking about millions of dollars for her to be in compliance with the ADA problems that she was facing.

SPEAKER_01

Which is usually more than enough to put an NFIB member out of business.

SPEAKER_03

Absolutely, 100%. Like she she was scared on the phone. She was like, there's no way that we can do this. And luckily, we were able to talk about ways that she can try and mitigate that and avoid that. You know, that was obviously the extreme amount, millions of dollars. But that's just a flavor of how bad this can get very quickly.

SPEAKER_01

Vance, what's been your experience with this issue?

SPEAKER_00

Twofold. One, there one of the nice things about the ways you can help protect yourself and be more ADA compliant, and there's a lot of crossover with what we do, is if you have a well and a good search engine optimized website and a well-built website, going back to the the keep it simple process. If you have a well-designed and good search engine optimized website, chances are you're pretty ADA compliant anyway. Because part of that whole keep it simple, it also keeps it simple and easy to understand for like if anybody's using a screen reader or they're using any of those devices like to help read the website to them. It provides from a search engine standpoint, things that are ADA compliant. Like every image on your website should have an alt tag because that tells search engines as well as things like screen readers for people who have a hard time seeing, it tells them what that image is. And so it explains those things. So search engine optimization, a lot of that has a lot of crossover with ADA compliance because that search engine optimization, you're also in your process of making it easier. It's easier for Google and AI to also understand what you're is on your website and how everything is supposed to work. So if you partnered with a search engine optimization company, that'll get you a really long way to becoming ADA compliant. And to go with that, there are also services available that you can plug into a lot of websites. And this is my one of my questions for you, Rob, is to how effective these tools are. There are tools like user way, accessibility, level access. These are plugins and add-ons you can add into your website. They put a little floating button off to the side. And if somebody clicks it, they see a bunch of accessibility options that will dynamically change the website to maybe give it better contrast, change the color scheme so somebody who's colorblind can read it better. And it goes a long way to helping achieve those ADA compliances. And for small business owners, that's an effective way. If it provides a I'm gonna wait to hear what what Rob says about it to make sure it's effective, but typically those just have a small licensing fee a year, and you keep it on your website and it helps with some of that. Rob, are those tools effective?

SPEAKER_03

I mean, what without putting the stamp of approval on any third-party tool, you know, obviously we we can't do that here at NFIB, and I can't speak for every other service. But generally speaking, yes, we advise small business owners, whatever we're talking to them on this issue, to work with professionals, third-party providers, third-party servicers that deal specifically with website accessibility. Don't try and do it yourself because again, the guidelines are not easy to understand. If you're not tech savvy, again, you're not going to understand what you need to do to conform your website. So absolutely work with third-party experts. As you mentioned, there's a cost, but it's better to be proactive than reactive when it comes to ADA. As a small business owner, you may have to pay some upfront fees, but we've already talked about what the fees and penalties can be if your website isn't compliant. So it's it's absolutely worth it to be proactive rather than reactive in this in this field, in this space.

SPEAKER_01

Well, Rob, before we go, have there been any legislative developments on this? And what's NFIB doing to help small business owners that have been impacted by ADA lawsuits?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so that's actually a very timely, timely thing, Adam. Timely question. Representative Sam Graves from Missouri recently introduced a new bill to address this issue. It's it's the Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuit Abuse Act. I know that's a long title. What the bill does is it stops abusive and targeted lawsuits by putting some administrative steps in place before a random individual can just sue a small business. You know, they have to provide notice to the small business owner that something doesn't look compliant. And then if the small business owner doesn't address it, then the individual who found a potential problem has to alert the Department of Justice and file a complaint with them. And then if the Department of Justice doesn't act, then only then can the person file a lawsuit. So it prevents the easy lawsuit filing that we see. NFIB has done a lot in this space. We support HR 7328 that I just mentioned. We hope that passes. We are currently in the 119th Congress. NFIB has identified ADA reform as one of its top priorities in this Congress. So again, we're hopeful that a bill will start moving. And we've put a lot of resources into aiding small business owners in dealing with ADA lawsuits and even how to avoid them. As I mentioned earlier, we have a free legal guide on ADA website accessibility that you can find on the NFIB website. We also have a second legal guide that deals with what happens if you've been sued and how to respond to ADA lawsuits. So kind of front end and back end. So again, anyone who's interested can find those on the NFIB.com website.

SPEAKER_01

All right. Thanks, Rob. Vance. Rob, before we go, anything else that you'd like to add?

SPEAKER_00

If you are a small business owner, first of all, if you're listening to this and you just joined NFIB and you're just starting out, don't get a website yet. Okay. Don't waste your money. Make sure your business works. Small service business, Google business profile, get a Facebook page before you invest in a website. E-commerce, you need website, period. Everybody else, make it simple. Make it easy for people to understand what you do. Hire a professional if you're not sure. But at the end of the day, and we all do this when we're browsing the web. If you go to a website, it takes you too long to find something, you go elsewhere. So use that when you're evaluating your website. Go look at your website. Is it very obvious who you are, what you do, what you're going to do with somebody and what you want them to do next? And if you're worried about ADA stuff, invest in search engine optimization because it's going to help take care of your ADA stuff and it's going to help you rank online and show up in AI searches.

SPEAKER_03

As it relates to the ADA specifically with websites, Adam, I would just add one more thing. You know, I mentioned earlier that there's no exact standard. The standard's not clear yet. There is an entity out there. It's called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They put out specific guidelines for how business owners can make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. There's a few different sets of guidelines that have the best protection. The NFIB Legal Center recommends that they follow the 2.1AA guidelines based on things that the Department of Justice has said and put out there. We believe those guidelines are the ones that would likely be adopted if a guideline was adopted as the standard, if it was ever strictly adopted. So for small businesses that want to bring their website up to compliance, I think those are the guidelines that they should follow. They can find more details about that in the legal guides that we've mentioned and talked about or through a simple Google search. And I just want to add one more point to this because this is something I've heard from small business owners that we've talked to. It will happen to you. People say, oh, it's not going to happen to me. It may happen to somebody else. It's not going to happen to me. It's not going to happen to my website. So, you know, if you have that attitude, it's a risky attitude to have because the internet doesn't discriminate and there's no barrier on the internet, as we were talking about earlier. The internet knows no boundaries. It can certainly happen to you, regardless of where you are in the country, regardless of where other people are. And as we've discussed, be proactive instead of reactive.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. Well, this has been a very thorough discussion and I think helpful for folks that are listening, especially if they're utilizing websites for their small business. I appreciate you both taking the time to join us on today's Small Business Rundown.

SPEAKER_00

Hey, thanks for having us. It's been great. Thanks, Adam.

SPEAKER_02

Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of the Small Business Rundown. Your continued support helps us amplify the issues that matter most. If you liked this episode, please help small business owners find the podcast by giving it a rating, like, or review. You can find us at nfib.com and on YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.