Why Your Business Needs a Website Today - And What To Do About It

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The first and obvious reason you need a website today is that these days everyone or at least the vast majority of people who need to do business with someone e.g. an electrician or painter, will search for him/her online. If they do not find you they will find someone else. The second reason is that most likely at least one of your competitors has an excellent website. This might also explain why your competitor seems to mysteriously generate business from nowhere even though you spend more on advertising and you think that you are a better painter etc.
In spite of this nearly half of the businesses around today do not have a website. Also if you have a website, it is a good idea to track its success. If you are tracking its success you may discover that your website is not showing up in Google or the other search engines when people search for keywords related to your business. This means that you have now discovered the need for search engine optimisation (SEO).

What are Businesses Losing by Not Having a Website?

When is the last time you looked up a business or anything else in the paper phone directory? These phone books have been steadily getting thinner as businesses ignore them in favour of the online alternatives. One of those alternatives is having your own website.
If you think that “you’ve got it covered” because you have a large ad in the phone book, you are wrong. A large ad just about anywhere is a good idea if you think it is bringing in at least enough business to cover its cost and a little profit, but you do not have it covered since most people are taking the far easier route of searching on a computer using a search engine that will give you a variety of alternatives instantly and even suggests corrections to your spelling errors so that you can not go wrong.
You can get yourself online with some of the alternatives to a full website of your own. One of these might listing your company in a business directory or getting a free page on facebook, squidoo or myspace etc. and there are a lot of choices out there today. But, the professional will have a company website that displays the company website to its best advantage and communicates the company message to the prospective customer in a way that will attract the kind of business that it needs to thrive.
Having a free page on someone else’s website will not inspire confidence in your business.

What Can Your Website Do For Your Business?

Your website can:

• Get the attention of prospective customers.
• Get your company message across to your existing customers.
• Help you to show people why they should do business with you rather than your competitor. i.e. differentiate your business.
• Give your business authority. This can be done by having an attractive website that has valuable industry information.
• Answer frequently asked questions, taking the pressure of your phone lines.

How Do I Go About Getting A Website For My Company?

This should not be a problem. But it is important to choose a web designer that suits you. It must be one who inspires your confidence. He/she can do this by demonstrating skill and knowledge. The two best ways to do this is by showing you previous work and by putting you in touch with previous clients. If your friends and colleagues can recommend a web designer for you, so much the better, but, do not take the first web designer you come across. Shop around. There are many web designers out there and they do not all charge the same prices for the same work. They may specialise in different aspects of web design and they will surely have different styles of design in the same way as all artists have different styles.
Discuss your needs with them and see who can do the best job for you at a price that fits your budget. Remember that you do not necessarily have to build the complete site in one go. (Although this may often be the best option) You can build a simple website to begin with and grow it from there as your business grows and you budget improves. But if you are doing it this way be sure to tell your web designer so that provision can be made for this at an early stage on the process.

What Your Web Designer Will Need From You?

There are several things that your new web designer will need from you before starting your website.

Will It Be A Company Website?

The design of the website and its layout will depend on whether you are in business or not and whether your business is small or a multinational conglomerate etc.

What Do You Want From Your Website?

Your web designer will need to know what the purpose of your website is, i.e. why do you want a website? It could be that you want to sell your products online or maybe you want to make information available to your current clients and build a community. Or you may want to attract new business by increasing your visibility online and demonstrating your skills, etc. There are many reasons and you need to be clear about what you want your website to do so that your designer can design and build the right website for you.

Is The Website Open To The Public Or Pprivate?

Some websites these days are there to provide a service for members or customers who have permission to access a members only area or an account area.

Do You Need A Content Management System?

A content management system enables the website owner to edit the content of the pages of the website without the need to contact the web designer every time there is a price change etc. These are growing in popularity today because they can save money where the changes and updates to the website are frequent.

Do You Already Have A Domain And Or Website?

It may be that you already have a website and want to drag it into the current decade. If the information is current this is easily done but it may be that you need a lot more bells and whistles than the old site had and you may wish to rewrite the entire website content. That means that what you really want is a new website. Also, it is better to have your current web designer build a new website than to have him tweaking another web designer’s code.
Choosing the right domain name is very important for the success of your website. It is always a good idea to include one or two of your keywords in there if you can, but you also have to think of brand awareness. Therefore you may want to use your company’s name as a domain. But most important is for the domain to be easy to spell and easy to remember, so keep it simple. Your designer will buy the domain for you subject to availability. There are millions of good domains already in use, but thousands of domains expire and become available again every day. So check it out thoroughly before you buy, especially if you are considering the purchase of an existing domain for a high price.

Hosting

Simply put, the host server is the place where your website lives. The hosting company is a company that makes it its business to host websites for website owners. They offer this service at a price and in return the website owner has a space to store a website or multiple websites and the world has access to it. The host also usually offers many extras like free software and support when things go wrong.
There are various packages available from most hosts depending on the level of service you want. These packages will vary the bandwidth and space available on the server as well as the extras available to you. But unless you know a lot about managing a server for yourself, you will need to use a hosting company. Preferably a local one, i.e. one in your own country, because you may need to speak to them and it is always better if you both speak the same language. Also, Google has a tendency to localise their search results. Meaning that if you are sitting in Paris France, most of the results in Google’s search engine are likely to be from Paris France.

Do You Need Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

The vast majority of websites will need SEO. This means making the changes to your website, on page and off page, that will make it show up in the search engines when people search for your chosen keywords or search terms. Without SEO it is unlikely that your website will have any visitors and they may not be targeted visitors when they do come.
Not all websites need SEO. If your company is only available to club members or to people to whom you give the site address, then you are unlikely to want others nosing around there. But, sites like that are rare. So, when you are having a website made for you or your business you should always discuss SEO with the designer. There are companies that specialise in SEO and do nothing else, but it is now more usual that your web designer can do this for you for a little extra.
Good SEO is a time consuming procedure and involves researching the best keywords to optimise for based on current trends and the business you are in etc., but it may also be necessary to make changes to the layout of the website to properly optimise for certain key terms. However, the off-page optimisation is equally important. This involves getting links to your website from the right websites and using the right anchor text.

Do You Need Email Addresses?

These days you are unlikely to find anyone of any age who does not have an email address since they are given out by companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft without charge. But if you are in business it looks much more professional to have an email address that is based on your company website’s domain, e.g. info@companyname.com,  accounts@companyname.com, John@companyname.com.
You may give your staff a personal email address and also have a selection of business email addresses that are shown on your website to centralise communications, e.g. accounts@yourcompany.com and enquiries@yourcompany.com or sales@yourcompany.com etc.

Do You Need Content Written For You?

In many cases you will know what you want to say, but you may not have written the content and may even have difficulty organising your thoughts in this way. That means that you will need a copywriter. A copywriter is someone who can take your ideas and put them into words. A skilled copywriter will collaborate with the web designer to ensure that the content is suitable for the page that it is intended for and is properly optimised for the keywords intended for that page.
If you have not organised your thoughts and ideas or made notes on your intended content, your copywriter will need to spend some time researching your business and consulting with you and your web designer.
If you have your content already written, you may be surprised when your web designer wants to make changes to it or even rewrite it completely or move different parts of it to different pages. This is because you are unlikely to have planned for keyword research, optimisation and the layout of the website when you were writing the content. Remember that you are the boss and what you say goes. But, the web designer also has a reputation and wants to protect it, so if you are proposing something that he cannot live with he may walk away from the project. However, this is rare as client and designer usually reach a suitable compromise.

Site Built. Now What?

So, Your website has been built and the optimisation process has begun, now what?
Now you will need to market your website and this means online and offline advertising. You should place your web address on all company stationary and business cards etc. All company advertising should contain your web address. All emails should contain a link to your website. This should all be done on an ongoing basis, not just to launch it.

Online advertising could include a pay per click (PPC) campaign. PPC is often a very cost effective way of advertising and can include banner ads and text advertising.  A prime example is Google’s Adwords system.  The great thing about this system is that it is contextual. That means that the ads they place on websites are related to the topic of the page the ads are on. This means that people are already interested in the topic of the ads that they are looking at. The other thing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

You only pay for the clicks not for placement or even every viewing which is often the case with usual banner advertising. If they don’t click you don’t pay. It takes more room than I have here to properly explain PPC but let us just say that you need to keep a close eye on your campaigns and manage them properly. Again there are specialist companies that do nothing else and it is important to choose the right one or manage it yourself. Do not set it and forget it. This will waste time and most likely money too.

Banner ads on related websites can be good but their effectiveness is limited as banner blindness increases. To combat banner blindness designers often add movement, but this can be annoying when a person is trying to read the content of a page and there is something jumping around trying to get their attention in another part of the page. Of course this is what they are supposed to do, but they sometimes annoy people so much that they leave the page without clicking on the banner.

You can always make a video about your company and products (HIGHLY RECCOMMENDED). YouTube.com has become a major method of advertising for many companies and people always prefer to watch a video than read a page of information. A quality video production can drive massive traffic to your website and your phone lines.

As with most aspects of running a business on the internet, there are companies that specialise in online marketing and internet marketing, website promotion etc. You name it and there are a fistful of companies out there specialising in it. If you are not happy with the results you are getting, move to another company. Choose carefully and you will do fine.