Development of your own website puts you clearly above your competition.
“A Redshift Research survey commissioned by web-hosting company GoDaddy reports that well over half of very small businesses have no websites or Facebook pages.” – Tess Townsend, staff reporter for Inc.com.
As Tess Townsend says, about 60% of small businesses (which she defines as 1-5 people) don’t have a website. Nowadays, everyone knows that competition is fierce and unforgiving. More and more, customers – or potential customers – are turning to the web to find products and services they want or need. So let’s look at some reasons for having your own website.
- Credibility. A website and your own company email address look professional.
- Having a web presence gives you a step up above your competition.
- Customers and potential customers have access to your business 24/7/365.
- You get to imprint awareness of your business in the public mind without needing to pay a human being, do it yourself, buy newspaper or TV ads, print brochures, or send direct mail advertising.
- More free marketing by having links on your website to your social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
- You can get statistics on how many visits to your page, how many people navigate around your site, and how many “conversions” (marketer lingo for when the user does something you want them to do, like buy an item or sign up for a newsletter).
- Handling customer service. Many customers have the same questions. A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page answers them all.
- Your own website can provide more information than a business card or flyer.
- Customer convenience. They can access your website at any time they are so inclined.
- A web address is easier to remember than a phone number.
Your Website’s Design
When we work with you to come up with a design for your website, we ask you a number of questions. What do you want your website to do? Represent your law firm? Sell a line of shoes? Showcase your art? Different designs are suitable for different purposes. Should you have one wide page? A page of text with a sidebar? What about a sidebar on each side of central text? We find out during your initial conference what would best suit you. What should be your description that shows up in search results, i.e., how would you describe your unique value to a customer in 2 or 3 succinct sentences? We can help you craft that. A well-designed and executed website is not a mere display of information. It should be a call to action. We work hard to get potential customers to land on your website, become engaged and stay on your website, make it easy and obvious to navigate around it, and “convert” to the action you desire.
Social Media
Social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more are available. The impact they have on society would be hard to overestimate. There can be a real synergy between your accounts in these media and icons used to connect to them on your website. Best of all, they are free. If you don’t already have these accounts, we can help you set them up and give you the basics of how to use them.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) simply means designing and coding your website so that it appears near the top in the results in a web search. 50% of traffic to a website come from searches. Obviously, it is not the only game in town, but it is just as clearly highly important. The most widely used of search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A report from 2022-23, Search Engine Market Share gives Google’s market share as 91.61%, Bing’s as 3.38%, and Yahoo as 1.12%.
When talking about SEO, most people talk in terms of Google. Truthfully, no one can guarantee that your website will come up in the top rankings of Google because no one knows what Google’s algorithm is. One thing that all developers agree on, however, is that “content is king,” Rich, well-written content will engage your customers and naturally contain the keywords that can bring your website high up in search results.
It is important to remember that Google wants its users to have a great customer experience. Google provides a number of tools for free for the use of web developers to help reach that goal. We avail ourselves of those tools. While Google will not put up with developers who try to game the system, they want to help developers to help you – the end user – to have a good user experience. Trials and tests have been done to see how Google reacts to different code changes. So a lot is known about how Google operates. We can put our knowledge of that to work for you.
Domain Registration and Hosting
There are two fundamentals to having a website: domain registration and hosting. A domain is simply the name the website is known by, for example, this domain is capewaytechsupport.com or www.capewaytechsupport.com, which amount to the same thing. Registering your domain name simply gives you exclusive rights to that name. Hosting is a separate thing. Your hosting company provides servers that hold the files comprising your website and serves them up to requests for them from web browsers. Typically, the same company does both for one annual fee, seamlessly. We take care of all these details for you.