How big should our site be?
The first thing to do is to identify why
you want a web site for your business. A
web site can do three things for a company
or trader:-
- attract new customers to your business
- provide information and services to existing
customers
- provide a shopping cart for people to buy
on-line
For a small company or business, including
independant tradesmen, the primary need is
likely to be that of attracting new customers,
and a first web site would therefore be designed
with that in mind. It can later be expanded
to provide useful information to the existing
customers.
If you want your site to provide information
and services, perhaps also a shopping cart,
this will generally require an on-going, permanent
commitment to the project. The information
you show will probably need to be updated
as things change. Prices will change, and
so will many other things. Additionally,
if you want customers to continue to revisit
the site, they will want to see fresh items
of interest each time. From your point of
view, therefore, the fairly static site you
would have for new customers becomes a much
more complex thing requiring regular work
and investment.
It may well be that you can justify the work
involved if you need to supply cusomers with
complex information on a regular basis. The
time involved putting it on your site may
well be offset by savings in providing it
direct. However, this involves educating
the customers to take the information from
the site rather than you. Just putting it
on the site is not sufficient if noone knows
it is there, so you need to tell them, probably
several times over. Even then, many customers
may prefer to pick up the phone because they
simply prefer dealing with a human. You
need to ascertain whether the customers will
use the information before going to great
lengths to put it on. Depending on what field
you are in, you may even have customers who
simply aren't computer savvy and never use
the Web at all!
Similar considerations apply to having a
shopping cart - it won't do any good unless
future customers know about it, and that
means either you must be at the top of the
search engine rankings, or you must be able
to contact your customers and tell them about
it.
To take this a stage further, you may like
the idea of a really cool site full of all
sorts of features over many pages. A section
for news about your company or industry.
A job recruitment section. Clever drop down
menus, a flash intro, and so on. For this
kind of thing you are now talking tens of
thousands of pounds for a web design agency
to design it all. This is not overcharging
by unscrupulous money grabbers - it does
actually take a long time to program up a
quality site, and ensure it works properly
without bugs (you only have to consider how
many major sites do have bugs and broken
links to realise that it is not a simple
job to get right). It takes more money still
to market it. The alternative is an in-house
designer who would probably be working full
time on the project.
The question is whether such an all singing all dancing
site will give an adequate return on investment.
For most small companies, probably not. Not
in what matters - new customers and business.
Which brings us back to where we started
- the first thing a site should do is attract
new customers. We suggest that for a small
business, setting up their first site, that
should be all you should try for initially.
A small site of maybe just 4 or 5 pages, done relatively simply and cheaply
need be all you need at act as a focus for
new customers. You give details of the products
or services you provide, and register it
with the Internet directories and search
engines. Anyone searching the Internet for
your product can find you (if your web marketing
is good enough, but that is a subject we
shall deal with later). And some of those
searchers will go further, contact you, and
buy from you.
The nice thing about a web site is that it
can always be improved upon at any time.
You can add the information for existing
customers later. Add a shopping cart still
later. You can completely redesign it at
any time, keeping only your domain name as
the one constant feature (it is the domain
name which carries the ongoing search engine
awareness - the rankings, so replacing the
site loses nothing in terms of existing custom).
You spend big money on the project when,
and if, you find enough visitors coming to
your site to warrant the expense.
The downside is that there is nothing magical
about web sites, and they don't immediately
provide you with a million new customers,
or even a thousand. Some never do, because
one of the problems about searching for something
on the Internet is that there are already
so many competing products filling the listings.
To look at the literature on search engine
positioning, it seems that all you need to
do is sign up with a site promising immedate
registration with 10,000 search engines.
The reality is that unless you are in a very
niche market your entry will appear at position
100 or (more likely) 1000 in the
search engine listings, and no one will ever
see it without a huge amount of work and
investment on your part.
For a small business the source of new custom
is much more likely to be local and specialist
web directories (something else we deal with
in another article). From these you will
get some customers, but how many only time
will tell. So obtain your first site, and
see how many visitors you can achieve before
forking out too heavily.
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