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Posh. You can afford a telephone line, right? A cell phone? It’s a matter of priorities.
You can install a web site very economically. Most web designers won’t tell you this, but if you’re at all computerish, you can have a simple web site up within a few hours.
Now it may not be fancy, but it can be tasteful and appropriate for your business. And the process of setting one up might help you prepare answers to marketing questions from web designers later down the line.
If you’re in business, you DO need a web site. Just like once we all HAD to be in the Yellow Pages if we wanted to be found.
Whether you’re a plumber or a landscaper, a web site often reassures potential customers that you’re “for real.” A web site can also explain how you do business, and it certainly can earn you customers if it’s well designed.
What about Mc-web sites? The web sites that cater to specific businesses — you know the ones. They do all of the plumbing web sites, or all of the homebuilder web sites. They all look the same.
If you want to look like everyone else, then go for it. And I don’t mean that derogatorily. You might well want to conform to a certain look and feel.
Otherwise, here’s what I recommend if you have a few hundred dollars or less and you need a web site designed:
1. Get your own URL. Don’t go with plumbing.com/williamsburg_va/your_business. For one thing, if you’re on someone else’s web site, you won’t be able to show up well in search engine results. You might not be able to control your own file names, and that can be important.
You can get a one-year license for a URL for about $7.95. It’s well worth it. Also, I advise against otherwise great services such as Wix.com for the same reason. Your site, SEO-wise, can’t compete. Plus, Wix is Flash-based. Which means that your site will struggle more to compete in search engine results. (And I’ve read plenty of accounts of frustrated users who expected more of SEO, but I do think that Wix is perfect for many users.) And you’re not allowed to design your site on Wix and take it to another server. I should also say that wix is brilliant! One day all web design will be this easy. I’m just saying that if you’re a company that might depend on search engine results for business, this might not be a place to go.
2. Find a good host. I use inmotion.com. They’re reasonable and super-responsive. If hosting your own site frightens you, consider asking a web design company (ahem) to set it up or manage it for you.
3. Create your web site with blogging software such as WordPress.com. You install it (or gave it installed) on your web site, and then make it look the way you want. Here’s one I just set up for for my friend Thom, a videographer. I used WordPress throughout, and bought a template for this particular design. And there’s not even a blog! Just an easy-to-use interface, and one that I felt confident that Thom would be comfortable with.
You can make a very clean and elegant presentation using WordPress, and you can do it with absolutely no html skills. You can even start out hosting your WordPress site for free on WordPress, and it won’t hurt your search engine marketability. But doing so will limit some control you might like over your web site (such as adding forms, and other web doodads).
If you do decide to go with WordPress for your first website attempt, try one of these two, both great template vendors:
By all means, I don’t intend for you to STAY with this little site you’ve started. I expect you to grow it, tend it, and make it work.
Because there’s one truism that really is true: Stagnant web sites will not be found.
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