Should You Have A Website?
If you a business owner and you’re still asking this question, then let me put you out of your misery now. Yes, you should have a site. Yes, yes, yes. I don’t care what business you’re in, you need a site. Period.
The only reasons why you can possibly still be dithering over having a website are technical and logistic ones. You’re not sure what to put on it, or how to get one, or the price of getting a professional site together scares the hell out of you, etc, etc. And yes, they’re fair concerns that you should take your time addressing properly. But while you’re doing that, get your site up. NOW!
Huh, you say?
Look, you can buy your domain for a lousy $25 Canadian — here’s an excellent service I’ve been using for ten years, and recommend highly, right here. Hostsellers.com. Marc will make sure you get your domain sorted out in ten minutes. If you don’t want to use his service, you can go to Tucows directly, (http://www.tucows.ca) and buy your .com or .ca or .org domain inside ten minutes — I recommend buying a .com whenever possible, by the way.
Then, find a hosting service where you can upload your site files. (BTW, Hostsellers is also a hosting service.) This is where, if you’re not in the least bit technical, your eyes are starting to glaze over, I know. Bear with me. If you find yourself a host service that will work with you, a lot of the technical mumbo jumbo will go away after that. You just have to find yourself a decent website designer who will work with your host service, and you can relax.
The first thing you need to do is get a very basic one or two page website up as quickly as possible. It can be a down-and-dirty thing with minimal doodads and gizmos. It just has to have your logo, contact information, hours of operation, perhaps your company’s mission statement or a paragraph describing what you do. If you have multiple stores, departments or branches, you can list those. There will be an obvious set of basic information you need to get up on the first basic web page. Ask yourself what most people would be looking for if they went to your site. Why would most people search out your site if they were looking for it? Why would you direct customers there? That’s the information to include on the site.
Get the site uploaded as quickly as possible, and relax.
Now you have time to really think about what your site needs to do over the long term, and how it might serve your business better. You can afford to spend time researching the uses of websites to market businesses, and now you won’t feel guilty while you do that research, because you already have a site in place and operational. And now you have just enough experience in how one goes about putting a site together to understand the discussions about sites that you’ll be better able to understand the materials you’re reading.
Here’s a helpful resource to get you started.
The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Website
