Developing small business websites
Developing a small business website is the most difficult web design project. Small businesses have limited capital, time and resources. This makes it even more important to design an effective web site. The site needs to be reasonably inexpensive and still minimize the amount of time and effort necessary to maintain the site. Generally these two requirements are mutually exclusive. Highly automated sites generally come with higher development costs.
The most important aspect of small business web development is it’s effectiveness. Small businesses generally cannot afford to invest heavily in a web site that will not produce. When they spend the money it must produce a return on investment.
Our focus with most small business website designs is on making sure that the money they spend is on features that will help turn visitors into customers. The small business owner can seldom afford to compete with larger businesses on search engine optimization. Basically this means that the web site must be efficient at turning the few visitors they do get into customers.
In many cases we urge our small business customers to forgo web site sections like “about our company” and spend their hard earned money on developing features that have a better chance of bringing a real return on investment. We also help these companies do a lot of the web site promotion and marketing themselves by providing information and training rather than doing the work ourselves.
But our real competitive advantage is our support after the design is finished. In many cases, once the site if completed the web designer is off to another project. We think that is where our job really starts. We are constantly answering customers questions on web site measures (how to tell if the site is effective), new and different marketing techniques, updates on search engines, pay-per-click engines and reviewing marketing offers from other venders. We know that if our small business customers are successful they will need our services in the future.
OK, so we are not the altruistic people you thought. We are in it for the money. We would just rather get our rewards from helping others be successful.
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