Truth 20. Creating a Web site: An absolute necessity
Imagine the following scenario. Your 10th wedding anniversary is coming up, and you and your spouse have talked about trying a new restaurant, called Helen’s Grill, which just opened. You want to make sure the evening is special, so you decide to learn more about the restaurant. You go to Helen’s Grill’s Web site and view pictures of its interior, look at the menu, read comments from satisfied customers, and click on a link labeled “Reservations for special occasions.” You find that the restaurant will set up a table for you and your spouse with fresh flowers, a bottle of wine, and a personalized anniversary greeting. You make the reservation. Helen’s Grill acquires a new customer.
If you’re starting a business, you need to be like Helen’s Grill. You need a Web site to introduce yourself to customers, share information about your business, and conduct e-commerce if appropriate. Although building a Web site takes money and effort, it’s a business necessity. A recent study of small businesses that have a Web site found that 78 percent feel their business benefits by being online.[1]
Although building a Web site takes time, money, and effort, it’s a business necessity.
Creating a Web site involves three key steps: determining the objectives of the site, building the site, and monitoring the site to assess and improve its effectiveness.
Determining the objectives of your Web site
There are many options regarding the look and functionality of a Web site, so it’s important to determine what you want your Web site to accomplish before you start building it. There are basically three levels of Web sites to choose from[2]:
Basic Web site— A basic Web site introduces your business and consists of a few pages that highlight your product or service, archive news releases and press about your business, and provide contact information. These sites are usually created from a template and cost as little as $200 if you build it yourself or between $1,000 and $3,000 if you hire someone else to do it.
Intermediate Web site— An intermediate site allows you to receive online requests, sell products via a shopping cart, process credit cards, and display more information than a basic site. These sites are customized by a Web site designer and cost between $1,500 and $6,000.
Advanced Web site— An advanced site does everything an intermediate site does along with complex tasks like tracking inventory and maintaining customer databases. These sites involved specialized programming and run $5,000 and up.
Building Your Web Site
If you’re content with a basic Web site and have a limited budget, there are do-it-yourself Web site packages available through vendors such as Homestead (www.homestead.com) and Register.com (www.register.com). These companies sell packages that include instructions and tools for building a Web site, along with the services necessary to launch and maintain the site. If you don’t want to do the work yourself, or you want an intermediate or advanced site, you’ll have to hire a Web design firm.[3] One thing to be careful of is not to totally turn over the design and maintenance of your Web site to someone else. Although you may need a Web design firm to build and host your site, you should learn how to add content to your site and make changes on your own.
Many excellent books and periodicals talk about Web site design. You should consider several questions when building your site and on a periodic basis after it’s up and running.
Is it visually appealing?
Do the pages load quickly?
Is the layout well organized?
Is it easy to navigate?
Does it answer the most obvious questions that someone coming to the site might have?
Is the site easy to find?
Does the site emphasize the points that differentiate my company from my competitors?
Monitoring your Web site to assess and improve its effectiveness
The third step in launching and maintaining a Web site is to monitor its effectiveness and make changes when necessary. This is an activity (called Web analytics) that many small businesses don’t engage in. When you launch your site, you have to hire a company to host it. Make sure that your host is set up to give you statistics on the usage of your site, or hire a separate company to give you the information. A sample of the information you can obtain is as follows:
The number of visitors you have each hour, day, and week of the month
The number of unique visitors that you receive (on a daily or weekly basis)
A report on where your visitors come from
A report on what pages on your Web site are viewed the most frequently
Statistics that track a sales campaign’s effectiveness
By analyzing this type of information, you can see the pages and products that people are most interested in, whether there are a high number of people visiting a particular product page but not buying (indicating that the page needs to be reworked), and how well offline promotional campaigns are working. For example, if Helen’s Grill ran a series of ads in a local newspaper, and it prominently displayed its Web site address in the ads, one way it could measure the success of the newspaper campaign is by monitoring the degree to which the ads increased traffic to its Web site.