Are you a business owner in Los Banos? Do you run a social club, benevolent organization, church, or charity in Los Banos? If you do then this article is aimed directly at you... especially if you do not yet have your own website.

If you DO have a website PLEASE consider linking OurLosBanos.com

Click here for some free linking graphics!

Thank you VERY much!

Folks who are seeking information about exactly what is available to them in Los Banos California find a very sparse offering when doing most Internet web searches on Yahoo and Google. It is my contention that Los Banos Ca businesses that 'go online' with well crafted websites will obtain a very large chunk of the prize as more and more refugees from the Valley move here but retain their jobs over the hill.

Current and future residents of Los Banos as well as other businesses, some of which may be trying to determine where to open up new offices or relocate ARE online and they ARE looking for information about our city and about what can be found in town. Sadly, many times they are not finding it.

With housing prices skyrocketing yet AGAIN in the Santa Clara Valley, families in the Silicon Valley who want to have a home of their own and a house larger than an ice-chest to raise their families in are naturally forced to look outside of the area they work in to find a home. One of the places they regularly consider is Los Banos.

When people from outside an area begin to consider the possibilities one of the first places they turn to is the Internet. The World Wide Web has indeed made the world a smaller place. Information on just about anything can be found online and the simplistic mindset of many folks is "If it's not mentioned online, it probably does not exist". Obviously this is patently untrue, but the fact of the matter is perception is everything. Many people will not take the time to dig deeper than they can with a few keystrokes and a connection to Google.com. This translates into the idea that - to a large customer base - if you are not online you do not exist as a business or community group.

I'd like you to read this paragraph again: Current and future residents of Los Banos as well as other businesses, some of which may be trying to determine where to open up new offices or relocate ARE online and they ARE looking for information about our city and about what can be found in town. Sadly, many times they are not finding it.

Why are people becoming so web-centric? Well to put it simply: there are only so many hours in a day! The folks that live in Los Banos and work outside of the city do not have time to waste driving around town and getting familiar with Los Banos - certainly not with a multi hour commute! Nor do I suspect that many of them carry a Los Banos phone book with them to work.

But personal emergencies and simple needs come up, and they come up 24 hours per day. When Los Banos residents who work over the hill are presented with a need that they want fulfilled, be it work on their cars, home improvement, emergency home repairs, real estate, decorating, landscaping, or even a nice dinner, it is natural for them to simply Google up whatever they are looking for as they look for alternatives and choices.

These potential customers and information seekers DO have choices - many choices. They have choices to do business near their work, and choices to do business near their home here in Los Banos. What will they find online for businesses in Los Banos is ...well... not much! For some reason most of the local Los Banos companies have not made Internet presence a big priority. This means that the choices they are presented with when they search for solutions to their problems are NOT here in our town but instead are with the competition over the hill! This is not good for the community and it is not good for local business.

Sadly, by not making our presence known online we are letting ourselves down as a community. While the City of Los Banos Government has made some MAJOR improvements to their web offering in the last couple of years (including putting council and other meetings online, offering a great contacts section, and a live feed of TV channel 96), the rest of the Los Banos community as a whole generally has not yet followed suit. This means that everyday thousands of people who could be learning more about our wonderful town are not doing so because there are simply too few websites out there that describe what we have available here.

The exception to this seems to be the real estate companies. Real estate professionals learned a long time ago that they needed to court the over-the-hill crowd and almost all of them have pretty decent websites. They are also reaping the contacts and subsequent financial rewards and not JUST from the folks out of town. There are plenty of folks IN Los Banos that would rather peer into their computer at a time of day that is convenient to them rather than trying to call 10 places in the yellow pages - but only during business hours. The local real estate companies realized this and they cater to it.

The sad part about this is that Los Banos companies and organizations have an an awful lot to offer that nobody ever hears about. The local businesses in LosBanos are in many cases just as good as corresponding businesses over in silicon valley. Why should it be that if a person wants to research (for example) home improvement contractors, that they should get so few QUALITY LOCAL website 'search hits' when they put in "Los Banos +building contractor"? Sure they get generic directory listings that everyone ignores, but there is very little in the way of personal-feeling business-owned websites specifically about contractors in our town. This is not just a problem with contractors, It is the same way with almost any specific search.

Believe me, when there are no hits for a local Los Banos business it may as well be non existent to those who are looking for your industry online. Worse yet the prospective customer may not even think that the industry he is interested in even has a PRESENCE in Los Banos. This may be part of the reason that we see so many contractors from over the hill doing work in our town despite having locals who can handle the job just as well - and probably for a lot less money.

Another reason that it would be very positive for the Los Banos business community to offer more of an online presence is the potential lure to high tech industry. Though I am sure that this is not a huge decision point when relocating, I would think that high tech companies would look more favorably upon towns that show a little spirit in this area when researching potential places to open up new facilities. Local businesses that are savvy enough to have their own websites might also give researchers the impression that that the local customer base has at least a modicum of technical savvy. This might then translate to the idea that a relocating businesses would potentially have more of an employee base to draw from if they came to Los Banos. As locals we know how many high tech over-the-hillers live here, outside businesses may not have a clue.

Businesses are not the only entities that relocate to Los Banos - people relocate too. When people look for a new town in which to live and play in they are prone to do online searches about things they are interested in. If a family is really into eating out, homeschooling, church, social groups, or shopping and finds only one or two restaurants or stores online, they may not look as favorably at our town as they would if they were presented with many examples of the types of businesses they are interested in.

Of course business relocation researchers would also benefit from the same thing that the average citizen benefits from - that of being able to see what the community could offer its individually relocated employees and families. With more online business presence researchers will get a better feel for the community and how really well rounded Los Banos is.

Everyone needs to be part of the solution.
ONE of the many reasons for the creation of the OurLosBanos.com website was to cater to folks that are not yet members of the Los Banos Community. Hopefully, this website gives them a small peek into our town but OurLosBanos can not do this alone. We really would like to see your group, business, or organization get online too. We can not and will not try to do it all.

Hopefully the peek that people see when they come to OurLosBanos.com is positive. We hope our offering allows them to see that while Los Banos retains the small town feel, this is not just a wide spot in the road where nobody in their right mind would want to raise their kids. On the contrary, Los Banos has a great deal to offer - but as a community we just do not seem to advertise it online too well.

It takes a couple of years of residency here before a prospective customer can really get a feel of what is and is not available in town. In the meantime countless dollars have been lost to places out of the area because the local businesses just did not put up their own website and or never thought it would make any difference. How much money has been spent in Merced or Gilroy when it could have been spent here and with less of an 'investment' in gasoline to make the trip?

It is beyond the scope of this website to detail every business or product that can be found in Los Banos, that is your job as a business owner. Get your site up and get your business online! We will happily link you and in our opinion you will better not only your company but benefit the town as well.

If you DO have a business that specifically is based in or serves Los Banos and you already have a web site we want to hear from you! We are slowly putting together our Los Banos Resources page and we would love to list and link almost every single business in Los Banos that has a web presence. (We reserve the right to refuse to link but as of this writing it has never been exercised.) If you have an online business please DO ask for a link and we will be pleased to consider and probably fulfill your request.

Let's do it.
So in summary it is our opinion that online businesses providing more of an online presence would be of great benefit to everyone involved. The obvious benefit to a Los Banos business is that they are able to showcase their products or services to a wide and diverse audience. This audience would include locals, relocators, and travelers. The obvious potential for increased sales should be quite apparent.

The increase in online business presence would also benefit the City of Los Banos as a whole by making the town more attractive to the high tech industry and others who are researching places to relocate. The presence a large number of community business and other community webpages will provide relocation specialists a better feel for our community, way of life, and what can be found in our community.

Finally an increased online business presence would benefit those searching for a new place to live. Giving people a much better idea of the Los Banos community and what they can find here.

Everyone wins.

Blatant Self Promotion
Stop here before you're forced to read our self aggrandizement!

Seriously, STOP HERE if you do not want to read our blatant self promotion... What follows is not part of the original intent of this article and what I have said above is a lot more important to our town than what follows. The rest of this article asks for links to this website and offers the services of MemorablePlaces.com for website design and OurLosBanos.com for advertising..

Please Link Us:
We would like members of the Los Banos Community (and any others as well) to link this website! If you would like to link to Our Los Banos.com we have made it easy. Simply select the link and you will be taken to a page that will offer free graphics and other information about linking us.

Why I Wrote This Article
Truthfully, when I started this 'What This Town Need's article it was with a sincere desire to encourage more local businesses to consider going online. I truly believe that our community as a whole could benefit from a much increased online presence and I know personally that from a convenience aspect it is easier for me to find things online than it is do try to find information out via the chamber of commerce, neighbors, or the phonebook. Certainly much more detailed information about local businesses, their products, and their services can be found much more quickly (and 24 hours per day) on a website than they can in any other way.. IF THEY ARE ONLINE! So I did not start this article with the idea of advertising ourselves but rather to share my perspective on gathering information and learning about Los Banos businesses and groups online.

Having said that I think that what OurLosBanos.com and MemorablePlaces.com offers could be of great help to businesses in the community and so I will briefly mention these possibilities.

Please Consider OurLosBanos.com for Advertising
In addition to being linked on the resources page (which is totally free) Our Los Banos.com offers a limited number of advertising slots for those who wish to help sponsor and defray the costs of the Our Los Banos Website. These ads appear both on the main site pages and on the forum pages as well. If you would like to advertise on OurLosBanos.com please have a look at our advertising page and then contact us for more information if you are interested.

Please Consider MemorablePlaces.com for Website Design
For those businesses that are not yet online and wish to obtain a solid online presence Memorable Places Consulting builds websites for members of the community be they businesses, community organizations, churches, or others. Memorable Places also does search engine submission and tunes websites for Search Engine Optimization. While MemorablePlaces is not a large website design company MP does offer a full service webdesign service that includes everything from designing and building the website to securing hosting, setting up servers, and personalized e-mail services. For liability reasons Memorable Places does NOT do online ordering types of sites unless the customer takes money via Paypal. We are proud that MemorablePlaces designed websites are very well received and are easily found on Google by potential clients.