So you own a small business. Your website is five years old, and it looks every day of it. You find web design companies online telling you they can build you a great website for $299. Or $499. Or $599. But you’ve had a few friends, and maybe a web design company or two tell you about content management websites.
It’s a decision made by thousands of small business about not only their website, but about advertising in general; do you go big, or go small and hope that will get you through? So let’s look at both budget html and content management (which we will refer to as CMS) websites, and what they can and cannot do for a small business.
An html website is the kind that’s been around since the nineties. The web designer creates a basic look, copies that look over to a bunch of other pages, adds your content to them, and presto, you have an html site! And as a guy who makes more money from CMS sites, I will admit that for some businesses, an html site will do just fine.
An html site is great if your business is rather small, if you don’t need to change the information on the site very often, and if time stands still forever. By that. I mean that an html site is STATIC. An html website doesn’t change. Any website that’s five years old is going to look very narrow compared to modern sites, because back then we designed for those clunky old CRT monitors. Now we use flat screens, and the sites are a lot wider.
 An older, narrow design |
 A wider modern design |
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A lot of decent five year old websites use Flash in one way or another. But iPhones can’t see Flash, and if you think that doesn’t matter, you would be incorrect. And those older sites, when they are optimized for search engines, are using five year old optimization. But Google has radically changed the way it ranks websites.
A CMS site on the other hand, can adapt to changing times, and changing needs for a small business. It’s true that CMS sites are more expensive, their content is stored in a database, which has to be set up and populated with content. But the upside is that you have a DYNAMIC website, which means that it’s not static, it can change any time you want to change it.
Let’s say that Google radically changes their ranking system. Your site can easily change along with it. Let’s say that SUPER widescreen monitors become the latest rage. Your site can use a modified theme and change, while keeping all of your existing content. And CMS sites can change content whenever you want to change it. Do you have weekly specials? No problem. Do you want to change your business hours? It takes a minute or so, and they’re changed.
Do you want to add a new page for a new product or service? With an html site, your web designer has to do that. Then the web designer has to recreate your site’s navigation menus on every page, to add the new page. And then you have to pay him. For a CMS site, you create the page, save it, then add it to the menu, which adds it to ALL of the menus. You are done.
So to sum up, yes, sometimes you can get by with an html website. Lots of businesses don’t need to change their websites very often. But if you do, I would recommend CMS for you. If you can’t afford it, ask about paying in installments. Not all companies accept payments over time, but we do. If you have any questions, ask them by commenting on this blog post, or contact Richmond Media. I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.