By Jared Pomranky
So you’re starting a new business or thinking about starting a business. In addition to a lot of work and opportunity in front of you, you also have one very big question to answer. How are people going to find you? With the exception of very few people, no one is using the yellow pages to find businesses anymore. The majority of users are visiting search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to get their business information including local businesses. If your potential customer is searching for your company right now, what are they going to find?
Developing a website is a great way to put your company online, provide information to your potential clients, and it gives you a platform to brand your new business. There are 3 considerations when creating your website:
1. What is your website going to accomplish?
2. How often do you need to change your website content?
3. How are you going to get your website created?
What is your website going to accomplish?
If you don’t have a very specific answer to this question, you are fighting an uphill battle online. Not only is it hard to measure whether your website implementation is successful but your visitors are going to have the same question. Have you ever been to a website that completely overwhelms you with widgets, news, and video to the point that you don’t know what to do? They didn’t effectively answer that question. Just providing information or an “online business card” is not effective. You need to push your visitors to take action with a call to action like:
• Contact Us today
• Download our free report
• Buy our most popular product
These actions lead your visitors towards providing you with more leads, more sales, and ultimately more profit.
How often do you need to change your website content?
This is an important question to determine what type of website you need. If you are selling products online, are they the same products that may change annually or are they products that you may change monthly? If you need to change products monthly, you will need a more robust eCommerce solution with a full back-end admin system. If you have the same products and don’t need a lot of functionality, you can probably get away with providing PayPal or Google Checkout “Buy Now” buttons.
For a business services site, you need to capture visitors information and entice them to visit your site by providing good information. I highly recommend integrating a blog into your website and a good back-end CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress. This makes it easy to change data and easy to update visitors to your website with fresh content on your blog.
How are you going to get your website created?
If you have some technical knowledge and a fair amount of extra time to learn some more technology, you can probably get away with creating your own website. My favorite platform for quick development, usability, and standards is WordPress. You can get a simple website up and running quickly and many good website hosts have a 1 click install of WordPress.
If you don’t have the time or technical knowledge to create your own website, I would recommend hiring someone for the job. Find a company that specializes in creating small business websites and have them use a common development platform like WordPress. The last thing you want is a website developed on a proprietary platform that only that company can update. You should be able to get a basic website created with a custom theme in WordPress in less than 2 weeks.
Creating a website should be a consideration when starting a business. You increase your ability for customers to find you and you get an extra sense of credibility from your customers. Take the suggestions in this blog post and run with them. You will be up and running with a website that’s better than most small businesses in a short amount of time.
About Jared Pomranky
Jared owns Net Profit Marketing, a Detroit web design, SEO, and business web hosting company located in Michigan. Focusing on creating more relevant leads for small business that leads to more net profit, they have seen excellent success with their small business clients.
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