Setting up a website for the first time is an
extremely thrilling step to take. It is a sign that you are focused on
your business and determined to make it a success. After all, the
Internet is a very global community, not so, and YOUR website will be
exposed to this community from the day that it goes live. You therefore
set up your website with the idea that you will attract customers to
your new business.
But before your website can become a well-oiled marketing machine you will need to invest time, or money, or both, into it.
The following aspects are all costs that go into setting up and running of a business website:
1.
Direct cost of creating the website. Whether you do it yourself, or
whether you pay for it, you have to remember that your time is also
worth money.
2. Direct cost of marketing your website. Your
website will NOT just start generating traffic all on its own. You are
going to have to first spend money on promoting your website before you
are going to see any return on investment. Setting up a new website
with no promotion behind it is like setting up a shop in a dark alley
with no advertising. There will be no feet visiting that shop! You need
to get your website out of its dark alley and into the light and that
will cost money!
Even if you do the majority of this work
yourself, you once again have to consider the fact that your time is
worth money, and you should think carefully whether you want to invest
your time in this activity, or rather spend it on other aspects of your
business.
3. Indirect or direct costs of updating your website
with fresh content. It is absolutely essential to update your website
with new and regular content. At the minimum you will have to update
new contact information, prices and special offers. But it is far
better to update your site with additional information about your
company and industry to capture more visitors who might be looking for
the very information that you are providing. A site filled with lots of
information about your industry also establishes you as the expert in
the field and builds trust in your visitors and potential customers.
So
how much SHOULD you spend on your website? If you are a start-up
business, it is a very appealing thought to spend as little as possible
on your site, since you probably do not have lots of cash to throw
around.
That is understandable, but be careful of being
penny-wise and pound-foolish. A badly designed website can be extremely
detrimental to the image of your company, and if the technology choices
that you might inadvertently tie yourself into due to opting for a low
cost, or cheap option, are the wrong choices, you will probably find it
quite expensive to extricate yourself from these design decisions.
What do we mean by this?
I
have often seen websites that have clearly been done on the cheap. This
can often be seen from the bad quality of the graphics, glaring and
clashing colours, ugly page elements such as cheap animated gifs and
poor navigation structures - all of this gives a bad impression of your
company. The way that your website looks is extremely important with
regards to the first impression that you make on your visitor. Do you
want to project a professional image, or one that screams: "I did not
have enough money so my neighbour's kid did my website for me".
Also,
and even more importantly, inexperienced web designers often create web
sites using frames or javascript for navigation. This makes the site
inaccessible for search engines, thereby rendering the site completely
useless from a search engine perspective. In real terms, this means
that you are probably very unlikely to ever get lots of traffic to your
website from the search engines and the whole reason why you wanted to
have the website in the first place is now negated.
Websites can
be very costly (quality takes time, and time equals money, it is as
simple as that), so if you are just starting out with your first
website and your company is cash strapped, by all means try and go for
a lower cost option, but educate yourself first of all the options, and
if you can, go for the best value website that your money can buy - it
will save you in the long term.
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