An effective website should work and grow with your business.
By Jennifer Shaheen, June 10, 2010 | As featured in Entrepreneur
Are you considering building a website for your small business–or having one built for you? Before you dive in and create one, it’s crucial that you consider your website an investment in your business and act accordingly. This means looking down the road and making sure that the way you build your site allows you flexibility and a cost-effective way to grow the site–and, in turn, your business.
Redefining the Website
A website, though based on technology, is fundamentally a marketing tool. This is an important concept to understand because when you think about your website this way, you will recognize that a website, like your other marketing initiatives, should always be changing. Your website is not like a book, where you print a copy and are finished.
When you decide to build a website with a template service or through a web developer, avoid this statement: “I want a basic five-page website to get me started.” More important, avoid the packages of services that sell you on this idea; it is a way to get you to rely on them for everything.
Changeability Is Key
No, you don’t want your first website to be a static five pages long. The truth is, in two months you are going to need to make changes to your services, products, special offers–the list goes on. Now you’re paying for changes and new pages to be added, and the price tag for that small, basic, cost-effective website will, at the end of the year, be triple what you planned on spending.
Remember that your website is a marketing tool, so if you are planning on using search engine optimization or search engine marketing as marketing strategies, you will need the ability to make changes to your website. This is because search engines give high value to fresh content on websites (along with a slew of other factors), and SEM strategies include creating fresh landing pages.
You don’t know what you don’t know, so here is the truth about what everyone needs–even if you’re just starting out. You need a website that gives you the ability to grow. You need a website that gives you a way to add pages, edit content and upload files. And because you have these needs, the best solution is using some type of content management system.
Invest in Function, Not Pages
Today’s small businesses need the ability to control their content just as much as larger companies. You don’t need an advanced design, but you do need a website that allows you to change the text on all the pages, the ability to add photographs to your pages and embed code from outside sources like today’s social media tools.
Think of it this way: You are not buying a prefabricated, rigid square box with sides, a top and a bottom. That would be limiting. You are investing in the flexible software for your website that will allow you to swap in and out designs and add functions as you wish to grow your website into its own unique shape. Invest in scalability.
A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words
Today’s template applications and modern content management systems don’t require that you be an expert in HTML and CSS, but if you are adding images or badges from your favorite social networks, you should get a little training on how these items work.
Working with an image program ahead of time to resize or crop images before you upload them will help you better understand how picture size and image size relate. Many of today’s content managers will resize photos for you, but to ensure that your website’s photos load quickly, it is better to resize before uploading. A little training will increase your success in managing the visual aspects of your website.
Remember: Your website is essentially a marketing tool for your business, so it should be able to change and grow alongside the other dynamic pieces of your marketing plan. Don’t paint your business into a corner with a “cost-effective” website that could eaily become costly and ineffective.
I think that sooner or later people involved in ebusiness eventually need to learn some of the basics of web development design. The key is where to draw the line. They key is staying focus on business marketing rather than technical. Additionally I you need to be more specific on CMS; briefly recommend and distiguish between the different CMS available: WordPress, Drupal, etc.
Good article.
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Don’t you think a well done point of presence site is better than nothing? Especially, if you get this listed in local search?
Small business owners often ask me about web sites. I typically tell them to either have a simple 5 page type site (who, what, when, where, contact) or they need to buy-in completely to web marketing. If you go half way, with a blog updated randomly, partial event postings, outdated information, then your business looks unprofessional and the site becomes a detractor.
I recently went to a seafood restaurant based on their online menu. Only to find when I arrived, that they had done away with all grilled items and only had fried items now. They failed to maintain their 5 page site. As a result, I was doubly disappointed. Not only did I find the menu not to my liking but felt I was deceived in getting me there in the first place. Had their site been current, I would have never gone to begin with and they would have neutral potential customer rather than an unhappy one.
Jeff, Thank you for your reply. My concern and reason for writing this article was not the number of pages but how some web developers develop websites. Consumers who don’t realize what they’re asking for often get just what they ask for with no guidance on what they may need for growth.
Your story about the seafood restaurant is a perfect example. They may have hired someone to create that site who never gave them the tools to edit the site themselves and therefore left up an old menu. This happens so often because an owner’s hands are tied because they didn’t work with someone who gave them the right tools.
Whether you want to move beyond 5 pages or not, new businesses entering the web, should know they need the tools to grow (invest in function) and not be locked out of managing a website themselves. Once someone begins managing their own website they begin to see the value of the investment.
Thank you again for your great comment.
Hi – Would you be able to, as the first response mentioned, briefly recommend and distiguish between the different CMS available: WordPress, Drupal, etc.
Thank you, great article.
Jess,
We often advise our clients to figure out what they want out of their website first before choosing the CMS to build it in. Each CMS has different pros and cons and you want to make sure that your site will function the way you’d like while also being easy to edit. Consulting with your web developer will help you to figure out which CMS is best for you.
Thank for you the suggestion about distinguishing between the different CMS systems. I will be sure to write a blog post about this!
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