Why should we have a website?
It is estimated that more than 100,000 new websites go live each day. More and more small businesses are getting an online presence. Why? What do the owners of these sites hope to accomplish? What are they trying to gain?
The harsh truth is that a lot of them don’t know, they simply feel like they have to have a website because everybody else has one.
A website has become something that one has to have, the “why” isn’t often considered. Before a single minute of time is put into the design, content, colours etc. of a site a business needs to have clearly identified goals for the site.
Before you get a site up and running, ask yourself the following:
- Who are my target audience? Who is this site aimed at?
- What is the purpose of this website? Are you hoping to take orders and process sales? Are you just hoping to get sales leads from potential customers? Or is it just to provide information?
- How will it accomplish these goals? Search Engines? Offline promotion of the site?
More and more people are now turning to the internet to find suppliers of products and services that they require. The number of people who will pick up the phone book is rapidly diminishing and Google is becoming the method of choice for the majority. It is therefore essential to your business that your website shows up in the search engines when a potential customer searches for something you provide.
A lot of small/medium sized business owners have a poor opinion of the web as far as a sales generating tool goes. This is because the vast majority of small/medium business websites are poorly developed, offer little or no relevant information, very rarely maintained or updated and are very rarely optimised for the Search Engines. A website is just something that they think they have to have and not something that could potentially generate a massive Return on Investment.
The silver lining for small/medium businesses is that, if they changed their ways now and got a site designed and optimised preofessionally, there is a great opportunity to move ahead of the field and reap the benefits of the glut of poorly designed sites.
A well designed, well optimised and regularly updated website is a very cost effective marketing and sales tool and as the nature of business moves more and more into the digital realm, the companies that embrace the change will see the benefits.
