By: Mark Lieberman, SCORE North Cook and Lake Counties
Whether yours is a product or service, today a business’s web presence is essential. How do you create that presence? Whether yours is a startup or an existing business, you need to first answer these 3 questions.
What is my message?
What is the likely cost in both time and money?
What return do you expect?
Start by defining the message you want to convey. Most estimates are that your site has 5 to 15 seconds to tell the customer or client why they should buy from you. After that, they leave your site and probably never return. You must be concise. Pictures and testimonials will help. Remember that if you expect people to find your site via a Google search, only 25% of potential visitors go beyond the first result page. If you haven’t quickly caught their attention, they leave, never to return.
The next question is cost. There are two types of costs to consider: site creation and site maintenance. There are 3 site creation options: do it yourself, pay a third party, or use a template.
Unless you are technically inclined, doing it yourself isn’t a good option. While it gives you the most flexibility and saves out of pocket costs, the learning curve is steep. It may take months to learn how to make a site. Can you afford that?
The second option, buying web creation expertise, means finding an outside source to create your site. This, too, gives you great flexibility, and the firm you select will probably suggest many options you wouldn’t have considered. The right firm can do the job quickly thus freeing you to perform other tasks.. However, the cost of having an outside firm do the job can easily run $5,000 to $10,000. If you pick this option, be sure to get an estimate first and then control the cost.
The third option, using any of the free or inexpensive website builder templates, may be an acceptable compromise. Their very abundance makes the choice of template seem overwhelming, but, thereafter, you can often create an operational site in a day or two. Depending on your requirements, the cost for this approach runs from near zero to several hundred dollars per month.
Once built, other costs remain. Site maintenance arises. You have to monitor the results of your creation. This gets into SEO (search engine optimization). The first question is always, “How many visitors am I getting?” But there are literally hundreds of other questions. Special software exists to answer these questions. The software is often free, but you have to learn how to use it. Minimally, site maintenance will take several hours per week. It’s a cost that never disappears.
The remaining question is the same as with any investment: what’s the ROI (return on investment) you expect? ROI is just annual profit divided by cost Your annual ROI should be at least 30% and preferably closer to 50%.Follow up is key. Measurement can be tricky. If you are selling online only, then you know the sales so ROI is an easy calculation. But what if you only sell when the customer comes to your store? How many arrive because they looked at your website?
Creating and maintaining a website is hard. Few get it right the first time. It’s a trial and error process. Be prepared. Answering the above questions will increase your chance of success.