Confused about what kind of website your business needs?
Gone are the days when a small business owner could simply make an off-hand plan to just ‘have a website’, possibly bashed out after hours by the receptionist’s son-in-law because he is good with computers.
No matter the size or type of the business, the absolute minimum website that Michael Dries, managing director of Mad Media Group, recommends to his clients is what he calls a ‘credibility site’.
“This is where a customer can enter the business name into a search engine and it is returned as the first result, and then – when selected – the site is professional in appearance and easy to navigate. This conveys a credible impression that will likely encourage the customer to take the next purchasing step.
“Hardcopy business directories are undoubtedly in decline,” adds Dries. He makes an important point; to many folk, Google is the portal to the internet and to all information. Despite your best advertising plans, if your website isn’t viable, you risk headfing in the same direction as the once-ubiquitous Yellow Pages – unopened and unused.
You should have a website, but there are many technical matters that must be considered. Will you host the site yourself or use a dedicated web host? Will you outsource the design? Do you have existing logos and imagery? Would you like to update the site content yourself? Would you like flashy animations? How much will it all cost?
Before emitting a single byte online, there are other non-technical factors to be determined. There are the four Ts of good website design: target, technology, test and track. Keep these in mind and you won’t go wrong.
Target
Who is your website’s target market? It may seem a ridiculous question, but the answer isn’t always clear.
Is your website aimed at the general buying public? Or is it aimed at other businesses or potential investors? In each circumstance, your design decisions should be different, including the information you present and your site’s general look and feel.
“CMS’ allow for consistency of designs, ease of updates and remove the need for technical skills,” says Sam Shetty, general manager of online marketing and design at Netregistry. “There might be some rare cases with very small static sites, where, for reasons of moving sites or hosting providers, or for particular licensing reasons you might still use HTML, but increasingly they are not issues and CMS’ are not costly.”
CMS platforms don’t have to break the bank. These have no recurring licensing fees and are freely available, though you might pay someone for the initial setup.
Technology
Next, you have to decide whether your site will be built with raw HTML pages – the hyper-text mark-up language which drives the web – or if you need a content management system (CMS). The point of a CMS is you don’t need to rely on HTML-savvy geeks to maintain your site because it enables non-technical people to add and edit text and imagery like a word processor.
A CMS works by storing the text, layout and images used on each page within a database. When visitors access your site, the CMS renders each page on the fly and delivers this generated HTML to the visitor’s web browser. The choice of CMS will also affect where and how you host your site because it will use a specific programming language and database platform.
Tony Heitmeyer, general manager of CiBiS International, believes CMS’s are increasingly warranted and merited. His company produces sites for large and small enterprises.
“Websites not lodging the site with search engines, not testing the page displays on different browsers, failing to verify customer emails actually get through – these simple things are often overlooked and they are easily fixed,” says Heitmeyer.
Test
The third T is test. It is important to verify that your website actually works. While that sounds like a no-brainer, it would be a rare web surfer who has never come across a website which did not function as expected.
Track
“You can open a retail store in a remote location, which might be cheap, but if nobody is coming to that location, you won’t get sales. Likewise, if you have an online presence and it’s not found on search engines it won’t help your business,” says Netregistry’s Shetty.
If you have a well-designed and well-written website, money may not even be an issue. However, Mad Media Groups’ Dries believes companies would do well to factor costs of ‘tuning’ a website to maximise search engine ranking when first considering the idea.
Like any other marketing medium, the question of how much a business should spend on a website depends upon the likely return they will receive on their investment,” he says.
Cutting the cost
So what should you expect to pay for your very first website? Shetty stresses the importance of having specific ideas for your site from the very beginning.
“If you don’t ask the right questions, the website designer knows your requirements will probably keep changing and factors in a buffer into the price. If you don’t know what you want your site to say, to achieve and to look like you will pay a premium price.”
According to Heitmeyer, a small existing business that already has logos and branding should budget between $3,000 and $6,000 for a website.
It’s money well spent. The internet is tearing down geographical boundaries so you can penetrate new markets but your business will suffer from competition if you’re not known.
Catch a detailed list of several major open-source content management systems (CMS) products online at nett.com.au/beginner/cms/
Top notch!
Though I question the budget figure of $3,000-$6,000, several vendors can get you up and going for much less (let alone DIY).
If anything the figure is conservative, most websites will spiral massively off budget… everytime…
I think you are getting too hung up on the price, the point of the article is to approach the entire thing with an appropriate strategy in mind.
I agree with Solomon – there is no need for a small business to spend $3,000 (or even $2,000) for a professionally designed web site.
For under $2,000 a small business should be able to have a professionally designed web site, with a great quality CMS (content management system), AND it should include SEO and search engine rankings reports (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to ensure it’s ranking well for not only it’s own business name, but also for at least local searches for the products and services being offered.
Another good idea is to encourage website traffic via supporting marketing mediums. Top SME’s are utilizing the power of their email platform by branding all outgoing emails with banners, links and clever advertising. In this way thousands of potential clients are directed to your website.
Nick – who provides such quality of offering for $2,000????
Hi John,
I must admit that it’s hard to find decent quality at the sub $2,000 price because there is a lot of junk being produced at these prices and I’d say less than 10% of those developers are producing quality sites that also drive leads from the search engines. The other 90% are a waste of time and money. However decent suppliers are definitely out there, and they’re usually found through client referrals.
You get what you pay for I’m thinking…..
Nick is definitely correct, there are quality CMS websites available for under $2000. Beware of the agencies who charge astronomical prices and tell you they have six staff working on your project. A CMS website for a small business doesn’t need to cost over $3000 if the requirements are modest. It has been my experience that internet marketing is the exception to the rule “You get what you pay for”.
Nick/John
Re sub $2000 web sites, yes we do them all the time, however its usually the clients first step into the world of online marketing and they choose to start with a simple (and cheaper) model. They will then move to invest more in their online marketing systems as they see the results come in and can compare the ROI to that of their traditional marketing.
We always use a CMS system that gives clients control however we very often find they will still come back to us to do anything other than update their blog or news section because most often they will make more money by running their business and letting us manage their online marketing program for them.
I find that if I concetrate on using my skills to help a business owner maximise the ROI from his marketing then they are likely to say ” ok that worked well, what should we do next” it becomes less about the cost and more about the results.
IMO a web site is only a small part of the entire marketing mix, its how much traffic you get to it and what happens when someone gets there that makes the difference.
A small business can easily have a self-hosted WordPress and Google Places site up and operating for under $2,000. I’ve made several already and they are all ranking on page 1 of Google.
In my experience, many small business owners are being taken advantage of by the big end of town with their higher overheads and more expensive / but more effective sales processes. That happens because the small business owner lacks the expertise but know they have to be online.
However, many small business owners need to recognise that having a website means they need to be more open to feedback and adjustments to their sales funnel – getting traffic is not the only part of the lead management mix.
Regardless of how much a business advertises it’s website, all efforts and expenses can be a total waste if their websites don’t allow them to track, test and convert leads and sales.
There are website solutions available for around the $2,000 mark that do allow businesses to do this themselves, or have a pro take care of it for them. I can almost guarantee if you spend less than this, you won’t end up with a tool that actually adds value to your business, and nine times out of ten, web developers don’t even factor in a sales process regardless of how much you spend.
Although it’s true a CMS will let you edit text and images without a web geek handy, be aware that CMSes are often really complicated – they can take a lot of effort to learn, bugs are very hard to fix, and if they don’t do what you want, you are totally out of luck. You are also generally locked into the vendor who sold it to you because no one else will be able to understand how it works!
I’d be very careful about going down the CMS route: plain old HTML will always have more support than even the simplest of CMSes.
I found that quality sites take reasonable time to create – especially CMS not to mention ecommerce. To create effective site: one need to think about marketing, colours, search competition, learn about client’s business to be able to do proper structure of the site. It is all time. The easiest site without even thinking about Search engines take good one week of work. Clients are usually concern about how site look ( layout) so it takes time to code CMS even if using pre-existing templates. Usually I spend over one week just on communication, research, keywords to find out how I am going to structure site to benefit clients even without extensive SEO work.
Yes I can create site under $2000, and don’t worry if it is going to help clients. But that missing the point of having a website all together. It is hardest part with all these false advertisements about sites for $300 or less to get the message across.
Use the builder and you have a site! cost you nothing but hosting.
Is it going to work for your business that is another question.
If I learn for last 12 years to be able to help: marketing, SEO, programing and graphic design…well I need to charge for that knowledge too If the site takes over 3 weeks of work with graphic design, with marketing, testing, setting on server emails, accounts etc and client has $500 budget what I can offer? Something that never will going to work.
I think we need to start educate clients – as many have no idea how much work is really involved if site going to help their businesses. Otherwise it missing whole point of having a website.
I have to also disagree with ‘A Website that Works For You’ many developers do factor sales process and do Google analytics and even conversion testing. Point is – clients have no idea that that will help their business to test effectiveness to their sites. Most of the time I had clients – that say “I want website and how much?” Many hardly prepare themselves to deal with developers. And frankly they have wrong image about marketing altogether not only about marketing on Internet but also marketing in general. You mention advertising… that is results on Google… but I agree without proper marketing knowledge even with top organic results… if their own clients/customers are not taken well into account – it is useless. I spend hours and hours to send my clients resources so they learn as they will know what to ask. Guess what? 99% don’t even bother. Only one that already had websites know it it didn’t work.
Re: “when visitors access your site, the CMS renders each page on the fly and delivers this generated HTML to the visitor’s web browser”.
This places a lot of load on the server if you’ve got a busy site serving up thousands of pages and doing the exact same rendering for each visit. A bit wasteful all for the sake of allowing the site owner to change a common item that occurs on several pages in just one spot.
We use a CMS system which allows us to make changes to templates and macros and then the pages that are affected by the template/macro changes are re-generated once and uploaded onto the server. So when visitors access the site, any pages which appear to be static are served up as such, not generated on the fly.
Jamie, I am not too sure about relevance of your posting to topic. However, you got my attention. Can I see example of your CMS?
To: Urszula Dziki
The relevance of my posting was because in the original article, the writer stated that a CMS works by rendering each page on the fly when people access the website. That approach may be fine for a site where what a user does immediately affects the contents of the page – like for example an inventory of stock for on-line sales or a discussion forum which people can post instantly. However, many websites are static in nature, so to have a CMS parsing and generating every page on the fly and spitting out the exact same output over and over again for thousands of visitors every day is a waste of resources, plus slows the loading process down.
Because our site is a fairly static site with around 3,000 pages, we use a very simple CMS under Linux which is based on GNU’s “m4″ macro processor and GNU’s “make” dependency builder which automatically regenerates any documents affected by changes we make. These changes are done in just one spot but could be something global like the header bar on all pages, the copyright year, or something specific to a certain collection of pages. That way, we only make the change in one spot (i.e. update the macro definition), then any pages affected by those changes get automatically regenerated and uploaded. This saves the server rendering the same pages over and over again in exactly the same way to each end user, therefore reducing server load and providing quicker loading time.
To Jamie,
WOW that sounds like a perfect solution for heavy traffic websites.