A website is a collection of web pages that are related to each other under the same domain name and can be accessed by visiting any of these pages with the help of a web browser. A website is a major tool for boosting your marketing efforts, reaching more customers, and generating more sales and revenue for your business. If your business must be profitable this year, one of the bold steps you should take before the year runs out is to launch a website for your business.
Why you need a Website
You need a website regardless of the kind of business you run. Having a website for your business helps you to carve a niche for yourself in the market and compete favourably with businesses like yours.
We are in the digital age, and all the systems of this world are digitizing. You can either get on board or be left behind! Many offline businesses are getting online at a fast rate and those who already own a website are often regarded as more prestigious, more serious-minded and more credible than businesses that do not have a website.
Accessibility
What online medium do your customers use to access your products and services? For the next five minutes, assume the place of your customer and try out that medium you’ve created for your business and rate it on a scale of 1-10. If that medium does not include a website, chances are you probably have a gruelling and user-unfriendly conversion strategy and it needs to be revised.
This year is the right year to create a website for your business. The arrival of the coronavirus has strongly highlighted how easy it is for businesses that do not have a means of generating revenue online to fail in the digital era. Having a website for your business helps you to reach new customers and easily establish two-way communication for your customers to easily contact you, give you feedback or ask about product availability.
Your customers are everywhere but they are mostly online and they are searching for you on a daily basis. It will be hard for them to find you and stay meaningfully engaged with you on a platform you own if your business has no website. The one-time cost of paying for a professionally built website is by far little when compared to the benefits you will miss in the long run by not having a website. The longer you delay, the more you miss out.
Business Expansion
Businesses grow faster when they have an online presence and owning a website is at the heart of it. The effort you make annually in restructuring your business premises and employing extra hands to help in the day-to-day running of your business can be replicated online. Some businesses generate as much revenue online as they do offline; sometimes even more.
Don’t you think your business could use a little more revenue by reaching customers beyond your immediate locality? This is very possible when you own a website that has all the information about what you sell and allows customers to easily place and complete orders online.
Marketing Strategy
In every establishment, a lot goes into marketing, you know why? This is because without attracting new customers regularly, no business could survive for a long time. People want to know what you offer and what their benefits will be if they take your offer. Marketing efforts have been on the rise since this knowledge became easily attainable by consumers.
Your website is your best marketing tool because it helps you to bring in more visitors while promoting your business. More traffic to your site translates to more opportunities, which you shouldn’t miss. Also, with a website, you will be able to track how many persons visited your site and the medium through which they did.
Building an effective website marketing strategy requires a deep understanding and application of several principles which includes conducting a site analysis (traffic review), mobile optimization, developing email marketing, using Per-Per-Click ad, leveraging on social media, creating problem solving content on your web blog, and many more which leaves you with the choice of the choosing those strategies that will work for your kind of business.
Do Business 24/7
Do you wish to take up a vacation but worried on how to manage your business while away? This disturbing thought is for a business owner that is yet to delve into the digitized marketing strategy of this time. Your business can be mobilized if you create a website for it right now.
Having a website makes your business available to customers 24/7 and 365 days a year nonstop, this kind of presence cannot be credited to any of your employees no matter how dedicated or hardworking they are.
A website is a nifty tool that every business needs. It serves as a shop where visitors can come and buy your products and services anytime and anywhere you might be at, with no restriction attached.
The fascinating fact about having a website for your business is that it enables you to do business on the go. Not minding if you’re on a vacation, or several countries away from your business or on a holiday, your business will remain visible and accessible to your clients.
Centralized Information Hub for All Your Products and Services
A lot of time, cost and stress can be saved in informing and marketing to your clients about your products and services through word-of-mouth dissemination, or other traditional means or marketing. However, all that information can be put on your website such that one can find every information about your product/service in one place. Detailed information about your product/service (documentation), how to use it (user guides), how it works and its importance (benefits) can be handled simply on your website.
With a website for your business, you can update information about your products and services in one place, send word to your clients about your new update so that they can return to get that new information on your website. This affords you more time to attend to other things that contribute to the productive running and expansion of your business. Quite a handful, right? But imagine the strain of still having to do all that without a website?
Don’t join the school of thought that assumes that having a social media account makes it unnecessary to have a website. A social media page is helpful for having conversations and engaging with your audience but your website serves as your storefront, your customer service personnel, your marketer, your tour guide, your team onboarder, your bulletin board, and so on. You can make your website become whatever your want it to become but you do not have such flexibility with your social media accounts. As your business grows, rebrands, and diversifies, you will need a more scaleable and robust approach towards managing your online presence and only a website gives you that.
Launch your website even after creating several social media platforms for your business. The aim of social media ultimately is to drive traffic to your website. Additionally, you can never tell the first place your clients will find you when they go searching for your business online, whether it will be your website or your social media account. But given the choice, they will always prefer to go to your website.
Before Building a Website
Every business needs a website but before you build a website for your business, there are things to consider:
- How do you want your website to look like? When your website is designed with the most appealing layouts and content, visitors to your site will enjoy using it, find it easy to navigate, stay much longer and revisit for later. When the case is otherwise, visitors get bored and leave, increasing your bounce rate, which can affect your algorithm negatively in the search engine.
- What’s your budget? The goal(s) of your business, the features that will be built into your business, the expected traffic, among other factors, will contribute to determining the eventual cost of building your website. A website built with Content Management Systems like Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly and WordPress tends to cost less and get completed quicker than those built entirely from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This does not mean that it is a bad idea to have your site built entirely from scratch, but that doing so can result in a very unique look and allows you the flexibility to build in any unique feature that may sometimes be difficult or impossible to achieve with CMSes and online website builders. Building your website from scratch will take a longer time and requires a skilled developer
Don’t make these Mistakes!
When asked why they don’t have a website, some business owners give these common responses as what has deterred their business growth.
I run a small scale business and thus, I don’t think I need a website.
The criteria for having a website is not based on the size of your business, rather it is determined by whether or not you want to reach more customers than you are currently doing.
I operate in a rural/underdeveloped area and my customers are not too exposed to digital systems like websites.
Do not let your current customer base limit your ability to have foresight and plan. Your area may soon begin to experience development and when it comes, would you rather be prepared or caught off guard?
Secondly, with a website, you are able to reach and serve customers beyond your area. This offers an opportunity for expansion and an increase in sales which is healthy for your business. Would you pass that up while waiting for your customers to get digitally educated? Prepare for opportunities at all times!
Who is your website developer?
It’s wrong to leave your website in the hands of some random developer whom you cannot vouchsafe their integrity or genuineness in the industry. Before you choose a web developer, do a review of the person’s works and confirm you are satisfied with his/her level of expertise and pedigree.
Someone promised to register a website for me free of charge.
Watch out for such promises, most times they end up messing up your brand and business integrity. You can be sure that a lot of features are compromised to deliver on a “free” price tag. We know of some clients who opted for such a free offer after their website had been running for over five years with good discoverability and unique content only for the new developer who offered the free quote to proceed to migrate the site, take down all that unique, high-value content and be unable to finish the website after 2 years. One could still find a lot of “lorem ipsum” text were still scattered all over the site.
There has been cases where a website designer fails to render a paid service to a contracted client, how do you think that issue will be handled if it wasn’t a paid service. How can you charge a designer on the ground of a service you’re paying no dine to get?
Your website is your strongest marketing asset; don’t dance to the tune of those amateurs that flag the coat of, “I can do it!”
What to consider when hiring a website developer?
A challenge most business owners face is hiring the right website developer to work with. Some developers just take your money and never deliver. In our experience, we have encountered business owners who complained about how their previous developer kept asking for more money and when the client refused to pay any more, either had their website suspended or the developer simply abandons their work.
Do not fall into the trap of hiring the services of snake oil developers who have neither prestige nor a business reputation to uphold. Hire developers, whether an individual or an agency, who have committed years and demonstrated consistency in the industry; whose track record can be investigated, and whose ability to deliver to specification is not in doubt.
Some developers are only focusing their efforts on what the eyes can see in the browser. They finish that and move on, but for most websites, what you see in the browser constitutes less than 50% of what makes the website tick. It’s like with a real-world brick-and-mortar building; the exterior of the building, no matter how beautiful it is, is not as important as the structure and foundation of that building. If poorly done, that building will collapse one day and the safety of lives and property in that building will not be guaranteed. So also a website has similar unseen considerations to be catered to including things like SSL/TLS security, malware scanning, Denial-of-Service attack prevention, bandwidth considerations, memory leaks, error logs, Search Engine Optimization, assets/file compression, image minification, responsive design etc., and on the marketing side, lead-catching features, schema markup and so on. These are things an amateur will fall short in handling.
To build a standard professional website, you should consult a professional web developer or a registered website development agency like ZechServer Hosting. Or perhaps, any other company or individual you believe can give you the best service that meets your need.
Your website is the home base of your business. Remember, domain name and website are two different services that work together in promoting your online visibility. Having a domain name doesn’t automatically mean you own a website; the two services can work independently but so effectively together.
We hope you now know that the size of your business does not count in determining whether you should have a website or not.
