The internet continues to be the main place people turn to for all types of decisions. If your business does not have a website, or at least a social media presence, it is missing out on a lot of potential business.
Consumers are searching for products, services, information of all sorts, specific companies, and more every single day. They are determined to become educated and read reviews before they buy. Without a website, a company is left at the mercy of third-party review sites and social media as their only means to share their products/services and reputation. If you do not have a website, which is hard to fathom these days, the consumer might not find your business at all.
Your website serves as the central hub of your business’s online presence, giving you maximum control over its presentation, content and functionality. Review sites and social sites reserve the right to allow others to post about you, shut you down, or hide your content. That being said, I hope you agree that your website is important and acting as the new front door to your business.
You may be saying “I get it, but how do I choose between all the different options that are out there?” Well today, we are talking about the basics every business website should have and the benefits and drawbacks that the different options provide.
First things first, every business needs to understand the basics of what a well set up website should have or be:
A successful website is well planned out and everything is on purpose.
Now for the benefits and drawbacks of the different options. In recent years several companies have promised an easy website setup process but in reality they’ve merely made the onboarding process, not the finishing process, easier. Even with code-free or AI driven website technologies, several important decisions still have to be made about goals, audience, organization, architecture, design, content, seo and more. Also, it is important to consider the time it will take you to try and do this on your own, the kind of resources you have within your team already, and how professional you want or need your website presentation to be.
Small Business Website Options
$ – DIY – Turnkey type sites such as Squarespace or a website builder tool offered at some web hosts will provide you a simple way to get started but you’ll most likely need help throughout the process to ensure your website meets professional standards and user expectations. When working in these environments you do lose certain levels of fine grain control over certain styling and functional components.
$$ – Template – Utilizing a pre-built template, you can save on cost since layouts and several functional components come baked in. This gives your web designer a starting point and should help lower your overall costs. With the right design customizations on top, these sites can turn out quite nicely and serve the basic needs of the business and end user. However, sometimes it can be challenging to find a template that doesn’t come with a lot of extra unnecessary items. Templates are available for purchase for the most popular content management systems such as WordPress as well as html5.
$$$ – Custom – When you definitely want to stand out from the crowd and have a site that gives you optimal performance over the competition, this is the route to go. It will cost the most since it will take more time to design and build from scratch, but can be a very worthwhile investment. This option gives you the most fine grain control over the styling and functional components of your website and is a great option if you’ve ever hit the wall with a DIY or Template option in the past. Also, if search engine optimization is important to you then this route will definitely make any optimizations smoother for your web developer to implement.
Pro Tips
There are several other factors that go into the decision-making process. In several situations, we have even found hybrid options can be useful. Example, utilizing a website template but applying custom programming and styling to suit the needs of the site. If you’d like to have a discussion with us about your website decision please contact us to schedule a free consultation.