Having a quality business website is required if you expect to be taken seriously as a company. Potential customers are more likely to be skeptical if you have no website or a website that looks like it was built by your nephew back in the late ‘90s – and we’ve all seen websites that look like that.
What should you consider when you decide to build or upgrade your website?
The good news is there are many options and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money to get a website that won’t embarrass you or your sales people. In some cases it makes perfect business sense to invest many thousands of dollars in a website, but in most cases you can get a great looking and functional website for much less.
One of the most fundamental requirements for a website today is that it works on a cell phone. A website that will display on a cell phone is said to have a “responsive design” and all that really means is that the website automatically detects and adapts to whatever device is being used to view it. It’s important that your site looks good on a mobile device because there is a good chance this is how it will first be seen now that over 50% of web traffic is on mobile devices.
There are three basic approaches for building your business website:
1. A templated “do-it-yourself” website publishing system such as Wix.com, Squarespace.com or GoDaddy’s Website Tonight. These website services are inexpensive and, if you have the patience and just a bit of technical skill, you can build and host a decent site for under $20 a month. You will lose some flexibility, but unless you are doing a lot of online marketing, it shouldn’t matter.
2. A simple inexpensive site that is built for you by professionals. Many web design companies offer affordable websites that have a low start-up cost for the initial creation of the website and then a monthly maintenance fee of $50 to $100 per month. This could be a good fit if you don’t have the patience and creativity to build a site on your own and would like to have a technical resource for your website changes and maintenance.
3. The traditional approach of hiring a web design firm and paying thousands of dollars to have a custom-designed website that is completely unique to your business. Depending on your business, this may be your only option, especially if you have many hundreds or even thousands of pages and need the technical skills of web developers and programmers to get all of those pages into a new site. Website projects of this caliber start at $5,000 to $10,000 and go up from there very quickly.
Regardless of the route you take to build your website, one the most important aspects of your site will be the content and the writing that goes into it. If you are not a skilled writer, it would be a good idea to hire a writer to at least proofread and edit your writing or even do the writing for you. You can link for free to content on Pallet Enterprise as a resource for your website if you want.
If you decide to have photos of people on your site, it is best to have photos of real people from your company and not stock photos of models. Real pictures are more believable and increase the chances that a potential customer will take you seriously. Stock photos leave a less favorable impression.
If you plan to sell products and process orders on your site, you can do low-volume simple e-commerce using PayPal to implement a shopping cart on your site. If you are going to do high-volume e-commerce sales with a large number of items for sale, you will need to hire a consultant or web-design firm or possibly work with your credit card or payment processing company that has experience with complex e-commerce projects to provide you with the expertise you need.
Ultimately a simple, clean design, ease of use and good writing are probably the most important elements to your website.
