When you are thinking about a small business website, don’t buy what someone is SELLING, buy what you NEED!
What do you REALLY need? In my experience as an entrepreneur, a corporate executive and as a business consultant, at the bare minimum every small business needs these three fundamental things in a website:
You need a website that is uniquely and distinctively YOU; not a reused template like everybody else has.
To stand out to your potential customers you must find ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors and effectively communicate your Unique Selling Proposition. A generic, template website is usually not a very good way to do that. It does get you up and ‘on the web’ fast, but usually fails to transcend a subliminal message that your business is just another ‘me too’ in your marketplace.
Of course, maybe that is all your business is? But if not, and you are going to invest at all in a web-presence for your business, you should make sure that it is a powerful presentation of who YOU are and WHAT you offer.
Your website should help build your brand, showcase your strengths and accentuate the benefits of your products or services over all the rest.
You need a website that makes your potential customers feel confident about doing business with you.
Selling your products or services to new customers like adopting an abused puppy from an animal shelter, or trying to start up a romantic relationship with someone whose been jilted a few times.
Most of our potential customers have already had more than a few experiences with less than competent, less than honest or less than amazing businesses. Overcoming those obstacles and avoiding any association of you and your business with those other bad experiences has to be job-one in the sales process.
Do you feel like ordering dinner from a restaurant where you see little crawly things skittering around in the shadows and around the edges? That’s what happens to potential customer’s confidence in your business if your website doesn’t loudly and clearly communicate Professionalism and Quality.
Your brief opportunity to make a good first impression can be quickly quashed if potential customers come to your website and have a bad experience because it looks like a template, the pages load slowly, its confusing and hard to figure out what you are all about or where anything is.
You need a website that accomplishes the objectives of your BUSINESS PLAN.
I’m a strong believer in economy and utilitarianism for small business websites; that’s business-speak for ‘I don’t have time or money to waste on anything that doesn’t help my business do what it is here to do – sell products or services to customers who are satisfied with them, and to make a profit while doing so!’
Your website should have no other reason for existence than as an on-line tool to help achieve your business plan. That means you need to have a website that effectively facilitates at least some of your critical business processes, like lead generation and new customer acquisition, or customer service and technical support.
And it should do this in a way that faithfully represents WHO you are and WHAT you stand for as a business (your brand, your distinctives and your values). And it should inspire confidence in your expertise, integrity and credibility to every person who visits your website.
If someone who is trying to sell you a website isn’t making a strong case for why their product will deliver exceptionally well in these three ways, maybe you should look for other alternatives. Don’t settle. Get what you need! A website is a strategic investment for a small business. It is a crucial tool that can really help, but only if it is designed correctly and really works FOR you!
