If you’re a small business, you’ve seen the TV ads, you’ve gotten the emails. “Build your own premium website!!” “Free Trial!!” “Only $299!!” If you’re a small business owner with a tight budget (shocking, I know…) you WILL be tempted to spend as little as possible for your website. But is buying a cheap website like buying a cheap sweater that will look horrible once you’ve washed it a few times? You can buy a sweater for $10, but you can’t get that $10 back after two months…
We’ve been doing this for ten years, and Richmond Media websites cost between $1400.00 and $12,000.00. So what’s the difference between our websites (or any other company that does small business sites) and those cheap ones? Are the cheap ones any good at all? Can they do what you need a website to do?
First off, you need to realize that the cheap sites are built from templates. This means that they have the design basically in place, and you (or the web design company, depending on the type of site) will add your content to that pre designed website. Let’s take a quick look at what a small business website needs to do:
BE FOUND BY YOUR CUSTOMERS
There are a two ways to do this.
- Promote your own website outside of the internet by posting your site address on your print ads, business cards, etc.
- Use search engine optimization to increase your ranking by search engines.
You can certainly promote your website yourself, and this might be somewhat effective for a VERY small business that serves a very small area. But to really get traffic, you need what’s called search engine optimization. This requires keywords and phrases to be used both in your site’s page text AND inserted into the code in the site’s pages as “meta tags”. Many templates allow you to add your own meta tags, but how do you find the right ones to use? At Richmond Media, we’ve been doing this for a looooooooooooong time. Do you think you can do it as well as we can? If not, your website simply will not compete with a professionally designed website. And if your website can’t compete in the marketplace, what’s the point in having a website?
Remember, a website is basically a form of advertising. Would you shoot your own TV commercial? Produce your own radio spot? Would you trust yourself to do a great job buying time on radio and TV stations? What if you got an email claiming that you could get a TV spot for $299? What if the small print said that your TV spot would use the same sets as a bunch of other TV spots, and that you’d have to write and produce it yourself? How do you think that would work out?
Staying with the theme, “But wait! There’s MORE!!!!”
ENGAGE SITE VISITORS
As you build your website, you have to not only attract traffic, you have to give that traffic a good reason to stay there and see what you have to offer. The thing is that Google continually changes the rules for ranking websites, and you have to follow those rules, while at the same time, keeping your site interesting to site visitors.
The key is content and navigation. You need great content that will keep people on your site, and you need that content configured so that people can find it easily, and so that your Home page compels people to click the right buttons to find it.
Do you know what a “call to action” is? That’s a part of your Home page that compels people to click the links to go where you want them to go. If you own a restaurant, you want people to see your menus, a map to your location, your hours, and any specials you might be running. Do you know how to direct traffic to those pages? We do.
Do you know what Google Panda is? That’s the new algorithm Google uses to rank sites, built upon the following premises: People do not like to read a bunch of text, and people nowadays want to immediately see what they want, and they want to be able to easily find it. Unlike the way Google used to work, Google Panda is based upon getting people OFF of your Home page as quickly as possible, and into the interior pages of your website. Do you know how to do that? Does a template (of unknown age) allow for this?
That’s just scratching the surface, but I hope it gives you a decent comparison between cheap template websites and professionally built websites. So, if you can only afford a $10 sweater, should you buy that sweater, or find a way to get a better one that will last? Richmond Media (and a lot of other web design companies) sometimes let clients pay on time. Ask us, and maybe you can get a $50 sweater for a few months of $10 payments. Because that sweater will last a lot longer, look a lot better, and it will keep you warmer.
Contact us if you have questions!