It’s hard to argue that having an online presence is essential for all sorts of companies. The advantages of having a website are evident, yet some businesses don’t invest in website design at all. Why should a company that has omitted using web development solutions start doing so? Let’s consider seven reasons why web development is significant to all kinds of businesses.
To begin with, there’s a little-known and much less-known truth: being online doesn’t necessarily mean having a professional site, which will be a combination of a domain name, hosting package, and a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla (or custom-made site design). Sometimes, all you need is a landing page and a social media group.
Rudy Mendoza, of Antiques Sales & Design, decided to terminate his decade-old site with several pages and opted for a simple landing page hosted by Yelp.com. He said the firm cut its paid advertising costs from about $20,000 per year to a one-time $3,000 landing page package and recouped the money within a few months since the page had thousands of hits and delivered countless calls.
When we talk about small businesses online, we often discuss developer startups. The best way for them to acquire an audience is by hosting their projects on GitHub, where they can easily collaborate with larger businesses and promote ideas, solutions, or ready-made code. For example, there are many projects on GitHub that provide useful advancements in SSL security (secure data storage, messaging, and more for desktop and mobile applications since desktop and mobile app development is steadily rising in popularity).
Another popular type of small online business is reseller hosting. Many entrepreneurs enter this route, but their budgets are too tight, and they can’t afford full-scale web development solutions. Such businesses choose to have a presence on free hosting boards, where they can deploy their offerings and try to find their very first clients.
Many small businesses, such as cafes or pizzerias (and many larger ones), advertise through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr, etc. It’s a free and effective channel of marketing when done correctly.
As you can see, there are ways to market without investing heavily in an online presence. But having your own website is much more valuable, and here are seven reasons why your company should finally move to get a site:
Your company might change or adapt the range of products that you offer, pricing policy (holiday discounts, etc.), or even business structure, which you need to reflect on your webpage. Having a website allows for much more detailed customizations compared to having a landing page.
Having a website enables adding a favicon to the webpage, making an RSS feed to keep your viewers tuned on the latest updates, using comments to gather valuable customer feedback and respond to it, and posting links to your site on forums and blogs. Several other tools allow for increasing brand awareness and customer pool.
Instead of paying for expensive offline and online advertising, you can invest in SEO promotion of your page, which provides lasting benefits, as the money you spend to advertise your page is money well spent. However, please don’t confuse paid traffic Rudy Mendoza cited with investment in high-quality content, responsive site design, market trends analysis, and well-thought-out unique offers.
When your customers need to know something about your small business, having a contact form, a live chat, an option to comment, or a phone number is a step for them, which increases the chance of sealing the deal.
Everyone knows that creating a professional website involves some serious investment, which probably means that the organization is not likely to disappear the next day. Therefore, customers are more likely to purchase from you.
Having your own website enables you to implement a referral program or offer discounts to your customers through the billing system. This is a feature that free advertising boards and social media groups cannot provide.
The ticket system allows you to accept and invoice orders even when you are not at the office, meaning that the website can make money while you are sleeping.