If you offer a product or service that anyone, from the general public to a small niche group of people, would be interested in, then you could be doing yourself the biggest favour possible by reading this post.

Probably the three most important reasons for having a website are:
> providing information
> getting an edge over competitors
> free and cheap marketing opportunities

Lets go over these in more detail.

Providing Information

As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth’s population has internet access. That’s alotta people!! A vast majority of these people will turn to the internet to find information and contacts if they need to research something, or get a job done. Potential customers will look you up, potential employees will look you up, maybe even investors will look you up. They are all after one thing – information on your business or products. Putting a website up will allow those people easy and quick access to that information.  Your website should be an interactive brochure for your business – give people information like product or service prices and office opening hours, but also give them value – link to articles on your subject area, or better yet, write them yourself.

Getting An Edge Over Competitors

If your competitors already have websites (do a Google search and find out), then they will already have an edge over you, but if not, then you will be able to scoop up much more business than they could ever hope to without a website.  Have a look at the websites of other people in your area of business, pretend you were a potential customer or client looking for the product or service you offer; what about these websites would make you want to use their business over others in your industry?  This exercise will give you a pretty good idea about how you should be going about your website.

Free and Cheap Marketing Opportunities

A website is a very cheap, very effective way of promoting your business.  What other media allows you to promote your business 24/7/365 to the entire internet connected world at once?!  Once you are online there are a multitude of ways that you can get your website address into the hands of potential customers.  Free ones might include participating in forums, using Facebook or getting friendly with the owners of websites whose customers might be interested in your product or services.

No Website Is Better Than A Bad Website

So far I have spent my time persuading you that a website is definitely the way to go for most businesses.  However, unless you are prepared to put the time effort and money into creating a great website, I would advise against it.  You can do your business more harm than good by having an unprofessional, illogical, messy website than by not having one at all.  It is important to remember that for many people looking at your website, it will be the first impression that they get of your business.  If your website is a well-designed, easy to use, helpful website, then people will naturally assume that you conduct business in a similar way.

A Daunting Task…

I understand that to the not so web savvy, the idea of creating a website can be daunting.  So I have put together a beginners guide to websites; I give you the bones, and over time I will write about each section in detail, but it gives you some information so that you know what you need to look for.  Incidentally, I do work with people to create websites – look at my web services section to find out more…

In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions below, or ping me an email if you require more information.

This entry was posted on June 19, 2010 at 1:03 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Business Websites by Elyse No Comments Yet