Step one: Do you need a website?
Like every other “investment” decision you make this one is not straightforward. When there was a lot of hype about the Internet, we saw the rise of the dot.com mindset, but more recently many businesses turned into dot.bombs. However, if we look past the hype there are some solid advantages to most businesses from using the Internet.
These benefits fall into three broad categories:
1. Marketing. Here, you can create an “electronic shop front” on the Internet and advertise your products and services to the world. Like all form of marketing, predicting the results is sometimes challenging. Your website should consistently reflect your business and your brand. That goes for everything, not just you look and feel; but the performance of your site – its reliability, quality and responsiveness – should reflect your customer service standards, overall product quality and market positioning. Remember, your customers will read the site quality as a statement of your business position.
2. Creating a community. A community is a group of on-line users that talk together (chat), exchange information (on forums) and “meet” over the net. The benefits from creating a community amongst your customers, suppliers and employees are substantial. You can be very proactive in working these communities, and they can extend well beyond the geographical reach you currently enjoy.
3. Efficient internal processes. The Internet makes it possible for your customers to buy through your site, book maintenance calls, make payments, or simply communicate with you in an easier way. There is a potential to lower the cost of servicing them.
So it comes down to a benefit cost analysis. You need to identify clear benefits that will arise to your business from having a web site, and work out if these outweigh the costs. Of course to answer this question you must know what is involved in getting a website and what it will cost. This leads us to Step two.
Step two: How much does a website cost?
There are two different approaches to getting a website for your business. The first, and the way most business have done it to date, is to utilize the services of a web developer, that is a computer programmer who can use the computer languages of the Internet, and develop your own customized site. Like any other software development project the cost is very dependent on what you want and how sophisticated it is. Customized websites can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a basic home page to millions of dollars for a dynamic site that will service large number of high-volume users.
However, these costs are prohibitive to many business owners. This has created demand for “out of the box” or “off the shelf” websites, allowing a small business to buy a standard website that has been designed and developed with the express purpose of being made available to a large number if individual businesses. “Out of the box” sites are very cheap – you can get them starting at $100 per month, and whilst they lack flexibility, some of them are very good for what they are.
Step three: What “content” should be on your website?
The answer is easy: what do your customers want? Consider what your customers want when evaluating content for your website. Do they want to know about your company history? Unlikely, except where it adds credibility or interest to your business. The content of your website should be focused on your customers’ needs. Anticipate their questions: how big, how many, how much? Help them find the answers, suggest solutions, and make it easy. That’s what the Internet is about.
For example, a florist could achieve customer ‘lock-in’ by offering users a fun online calendar with free birthday reminders by email. Customers could enter the dates of important birthdays, and the website send them reminder a week before the next birthday – with an offer for a 10 per cent discount included. Everybody wins.
The second key component for your content should deal with developing your Internet community. Remember the web is a place where people share information. Provide opportunities for your customers to send you feedback, ask questions or suggest ideas (and don’t forget to listen!). You can also get valuable information for your small business on the Internet by tapping into other online communities where your audience is active. For example, if you sell kids clothing, check out what mothers are chatting about on bulletin boards for young parents.
The third element that might be on your site is the functionality needed to improve your internal processes. If your benefit-cost analysis identified internal efficiencies as a major part of your on-line strategy, then your website needs to have these built into it. There is some good news here for small business owners. Many work processes have now been computerized using the internet programming languages and these can be re-used by web developers. An example might be a reservation system. The basic processes for a reservation system are the same, so once a program has been written once it can be easily adapted for other users. This means it is available quicker and cheaper as the cost of development has already been recovered. Increasingly small business web sites will have more process improvement content and will not solely be marketing initiatives.
The second article in this series will look at how you can determine ongoing issues and costs, measure the effectiveness of your site and it will also outline Internet options.
Copyright 2003, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.