With today’s fast-paced industries, businesses without an online presence are usually left behind. Whether you plan to sell or promote your products or services online, the advantages of having a small business website are evident. Since product search and online shopping are becoming increasingly popular and convenient, millions of people search for different services and products on a daily basis. With an increasing number of people using the internet regularly, small business companies would be crazy not to take advantage of having a website as an effective and low-cost promotional tool.

Websites provide small businesses an advantage compared to other companies still selling their products and services the old-fashioned way. In order to increase customers, boost profits and improve your company’s popularity, the only way is to take advantage of small business websites and introduce your products and services to Australia and the world.

Although there are thousands of small businesses with websites, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have an effective online presence. For a small business website to succeed, it should be easily found and be able to convert visitors to actual customers. Clear site navigation, good content with the right keywords, fast loading pages and graphics and implementing search engine optimization (SEO) are all vital to the performance of your website.

Getting your small business to succeed online is no easy task, but once all these important steps are properly integrated into your website, the exposure and income it will provide your business is more than enough to justify the time and expense in setting one up and maintaining it.

So, what are you waiting for? Make a start today and contact me to get things underway. I’m a small business operator myself and I know how little time you get to attend to these kind of things, but you will be surprised how quick and easy the whole process can be. Use a Seriously Simple Site to get your business moving again!

Now, providing an additional service to their customers is fine, but unless you have money to throw away it always pays to compare ‘apples with apples’.

Firstly, domain name registration is handled by accredited domain registry agencies – a fee, which usually covers 2 years, is paid to the agency and that means you are the registered owner of the domain name. Period. No additional domain maintenance fees are required (there is nothing to maintain afterall!) and charging an additional fee for this is hard to justify.

The actual 2 year fee should be in the $35 to $50 range for a .com.au or .net.au domain name, but there are many companies, not just telcos, that charge double this. The phone company I’m talking about even has the gall to charge a monthly ‘management’ fee on top! The fee is justified by them as ‘providing email services for the domain’ – you’d be hard-pressed to find any good hosting company that charge their customers extra for this very basic (and included) feature of hosting accounts.

Secondly, web site hosting fees do vary considerably. You should expect to pay between $15 – $25 per month for a reasonable amount of space on quality hosting on AUSTRALIAN-BASED hosting servers. You can pay considerably less by using US-based servers – I would strongly advise against doing this and I will discuss this in detail below. I have seen figures as high as $40-$70 per month from telcos and other providers for little more than basic hosting plans.

How can they charge this much? The brand name is ‘trusted’ and the ‘benefit’ of paying the hosting along with the phone bill is often mentioned as the reasoning to me. Ok sure, that’s fine and if that is important to you then I don’t have a problem with it – just so long as the hosting provided is standard web hosting with all the expected included features like SQL database support and CPanel or similar facility so the customer (or web designer) can easily add or change their hosting account features.

I’ve just completed a site that could not be built with CMS features for just this reason – the client’s hosting was with their telco and they don’t provide the facility of MySQL which is needed for CMS sites unless the client was prepared to change to an even more expensive plan and then pay for the ‘extra’ MySQL facility! They weren’t prepared to do this and I don’t blame them.

Be warned – as with any contract or deal you may be offered, read the fine print and ask around before agreeing to anything!

As I mentioned above, you can use US-based servers to host your website and the cost savings are certainly there. However – and this is not just my opinion, it is from my experiences with hosting companies over many years – you do get what you pay for. I have experienced all of these from offshore-based server companies – slow page loading times, websites completely unavailable (offline), website email accounts disappearing and poor technical support (if any – one company I used were only contactable by email and messages were simply ignored for weeks). I never regretted changing to good quality Australian-based servers and quite simply, will not provide offshore hosting for any of my customer’s websites.

Firstly, I’ll give you some background information about website design methods used in Australia and world-wide.

In the past – and by that I mean only 2-3 years ago – the vast majority of web sites were designed by two methods. One school of thought used software like Microsoft FrontPage or DreamWeaver that enabled them to deliver reasonably professional-looking sites without needing to understand the code that these packages provided. The second method was to use a combination of this type of software and also very time consuming hand-coding of the ‘html’ pages that make up many websites.

The drawback to both methods was (and is) that unless a lot of planning went into ensuring the initial design and menu structure was very well planned and tightly ‘tied-down’, often the time and hence the cost of the site design easily spiraled out of control.

With the advent of clever CMS or Content Management System software like WordPress, the whole process became easier and quicker without loosing any of the design, content and functionality expected of a professional web site. If you are still not convinced, take a good look around this web site. Does it look or behave any differently than a ’standard’ site? In fact, most WordPress sites load quicker, conform more closely to web standards and – with the huge added bonus of being easily updated by the client – are just simply better!

The constraints of tying the customer down to tight page layouts and menu structures because of the difficulty of adding pages and changing menus also disappeared when good CMS software came along. If the client wants me to add a page or change the menu order or even placement of a menu it can usually be done in under an hour rather than 3 to 4 hours.

Another very important advantage that WordPress-powered sites have is the built-in SEO features that make it simpler to improve search engine ranking. It is widely considered to be able to create some of the most ‘Google-friendly’ web sites available.

So, have I sold you yet? I hope so!

Don’t hesitate to contact me for an accurate estimate for a WordPress website for your small business or organisation.

This may sound obvious, but as a rule of thumb any business that people would use the internet to search for will benefit greatly from having a site!

Examples of these kinds of businesses are: holiday and general accommodation, restaurants, cafes, product manufacturing, design, transport, hire, vineyards & wineries, home-based businesses, specialty foods – the list really is endless as these days the internet is often the first method people use to search for a business.

There are a few kinds of businesses that would usually gain little benefit from a website. They include: local shops, ie: general stores, bakeries, takeaways, hair dressers and the like that depend mainly on ‘walk in’ and local customers. The exception to this general rule is for these kind of businesses that offer other services – eg: a bakery that also provides a catering service.

If you are still not convinced of the likely benefits to your business, have a read through these points:

Why should my business have a website?

1. To provide basic information that establishes credibility – just as a listing in the Yellow Pages shows you are serious about your business, having your own company domain reinforces your legitimacy as a serious business.
2. To provide a map showing your business location. Sometimes finding you is the hard part!
3. To sell and promote your products and/or services. Customers explore alternatives over the web before buying.
4. To make business information readily available to your customers and clients.
5. To provide easy contact information – phone numbers are long and difficult to memorize in a couple of seconds. It is much easier to memorize a name, and append .com.au to the end.
6. To reach your local market. The web reaches the world, but customers use it for local information as well.
7. To be a free receptionist. Use your web site to answer your most frequently asked questions rather than field phone calls.
8. To reduce costs, by displaying your products on the web instead of printing costly brochures.
9. To disguise the fact that you are a small operation. You may have a small home-based business and that may put some off – a professional web site says that you are a serious business without divulging your size!
10. To stay in contact with salespeople, customers and suppliers.
11. To test market new services and products. You may also learn that you have a market you hadn’t thought of.
12. To easily publicise specials you are offering. Couple this with e-mail promotion to your existing clients.
13. To reach the media. Newsletter editors may like something on your site and refer to it in their articles.
14. To reach specialised or international markets.
15. To enhance your business relationships.

But, anyone who is in business knows that just having talent in a particular field doesn’t guarantee success in a business venture. You probably have staff working for you that are ten times better than you are in the actual production or service that your business is about – but I bet you wouldn’t consider that they could actually run the business!

I believe that in order for us to have a successful business relationship, we need to be able to discuss your web site project from the point of view of your business, not the technology that makes it work.

My role is not just to deliver a web site for you, it is to ensure it promotes your products and services as well as any advertising or promotional tool can.

Some of the pitfalls in using the cheapest solution you can find are:

1. Generally if you pay cheap you get cheap with web design. Also be aware that with cheap web design you are unlikely to get that extra knowledge of usability, accessibility and search engine optimisation which are key to a site’s success.
2. Many small businesses and non-profit organisations make the mistake of designing their own sites. Are you really saving money by designing it yourself? The time and money you spend buying and learning how to use a software package, coming up with a good design, searching for a hosting company and tracking down the cheapest domain name could be more wisely spent on your small business.
3. Cheap web sites are nearly always hosted on overseas (usually US) servers and the access to your web site can be slow and unreliable. Although server ‘uptime’ can never be 100% guaranteed, website reliability varies considerably among hosting providers.
4. Many designers never bother to check if the site is compatible with browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. This means that people who use a different browser to access your web site may not be able to read or navigate through it. I always confirm that a site is readable and functioning in the other major browsers.
5. Your website is a bit like a shop front, you need to have it looking great for the user to continue to browse. The first few seconds on a website is crucial to the visitor continuing. Websites that are poorly designed or slow to load will put users off, losing that potential customer.
6. You want someone that will take the time to advise you on layout, content and other areas of your website. Some designers will not even bother to proof-read what you supply and simply ‘cut & paste’ it onto the site pages.

Websites are no longer just about design but need to be functional, interactive, accessible and actually be an integral part of a company’s marketing and promotion. You should be building relationships with your customers and other players over the internet, not impressing them with ‘eye-candy’.

Quality is the key word here. There will always be clients who are only interested in a quick solution. Something that does the job. Then there will be those who believe quality comes at a cost, and good design and continuing support is worth paying a fair price for.

If you are the latter, we can do business!