Congratulations, you’re in business! You have a product, you have cashflow; do you have a website that reflects how awesome you are?
Logically, this means you should make sure you have a website that is going to tell customers just how fantastic you are and why they should choose you over your competitors.
A common challenge with small businesses is underestimating the importance of a professional looking website. Many of us aren’t all tech savvy, and we’re all short on cash.
But when you do this, what you get is very often of poor quality and not a great representation of your brand.
It may look fine to you if you’re not very active on the internet, but trust us when we say that your clients can spot a bad site and will judge your products based on it. Too often, if you don’t build a solid website, in the beginning, you end up paying for it down the line. When your business grows, you’re stuck spending more time and money to get it built properly from scratch or trying to repurpose an existing website which isn’t flexible enough to grow with you.
In the interest of saving money, and not understanding the impact it has on consumer’s opinions, it’s tempting to go with cheaper options; promising “fast” and “professional” sites for merely a couple of hundred dollars.
Just as you wouldn’t skimp when hiring a lawyer, building a house, or servicing your car; you shouldn’t skimp when it comes to getting a website built. Don’t immediately scoff at a high price in the thousands, often what you’re getting goes well beyond “just some text and pictures.”
Truly professional designers and developers will ensure careful attention is paid to your existing branding, matching the experiences that your customers would expect, and most importantly, present a professional face in the ever growing online fields. You’re not just paying for text and pictures, you’re paying for years of experience and training and knowledge being focused on your business and its needs.
Put the extra cash in now, and avoid yourself a headache next year when you work out that your site is the thing turning customers to your competitors, and then you have to pay the professionals to strip it down and build it again like should have been done in the first place.
Don’t just go with the first result in Google, either; take some time, do some research. Any decent developer should have a portfolio of their best work. Go through and make sure you like what they’ve done in the past. Your web presence should not be a spur of the moment decision, nor should it be done by the lowest bidder. Quality is key. Like the old saying goes, “Good, cheap, fast: You can only pick two.”. With building your website, you should always be picking “good”.
Lastly, even if you’re convinced that your business isn’t yet big enough to warrant having a website, make sure you’re at least using Google My Business, which will make sure you can be found and contacted by everyone using Google (which is pretty much everyone).
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