I agree wholeheartedly. It is a lack of understanding on the part of the business owners for about what a website is FOR and a lack of interest in educating them on the part of the developers on these websites.

I'm sure this isn't an original idea but web development firms should offer a subscription package to owners. This subscription would assist them in monitoring the performance of their total web presence (not just the website which is becoming less relevant these days) and assisting them in improving it. It could certainly prove a point of difference in a saturated market especially if you got a great case study or two behind you to present to customers.

The difficulty is that site developers are just programmers and designers and not salesmen and marketers so they either don't understand or care about what I just talked about or don't know how to sell it to the business owners.