While developing their business plans most small business owners contemplate whether or not their business needs a website. I believe that any business today should have at least a basic website. Having a website makes your business look more professional and credible. Having a website also shows your customers that you are serious about your business and its longevity.
When evaluating your options for a business website you will want to decide whether you will make your own website or have it designed by a professional web designer. To make this decision you will want to look at your business finances and personal skills and decide if you can create a website yourself or if you are better off outsourcing the job to a professional. You will want to decide where you will host your website and what options you would like to have such as your domain name, e-mail accounts, merchant account, etc… Armed with these decisions made, the next step is finding a web designer to work with or finding a site to host your website if you will be building your own website.
If you decide your business website should be designed by a professional web designer make sure you ask them up front for all of their prices and some examples of their other website work.
Make sure to spend the time reviewing their other work and verifying that your style and theirs are a good match for your business website.
If you decide to use a professional to design your website, you will also want to take into consideration their fees and upkeep of your website when you need to make modifications to it in the future. Will you be able to change things yourself once the site is up and running or will you have to rely on the designer for even the most basic of changes? Having a website for your business will be an expense and you need to make sure that expense is affordable to your business both today and in the future.
Should you choose to design your own website, there are many companies out there with great plans for hosting and software to aid you in the process of creating your own website. One such site is www.godaddy.com. At Go Daddy you can reserve your domain name, host and build a website, and have e-mail accounts for your business domain, all for about hundred dollars per year. This can be a wonderful option if you have some time and patience to build your own website. By using the software and templates available to you, it is easily possible to build a basic business website in a weekend’s time.
While having a website for your business is an added expense it will help to make your business look more professional and stable. Having your own website can also help to advertise your business. You can put the URL of your website on your vehicles and get some free advertisement while you conduct business and even just run errands around town. You can put your website on your business cards and show your customers that you are serious about your business and its image.
