This is the second of a series of five posts; here at Clicks & Mortar Websites, we will cover five of the main reasons people think their business doesn’t need a website. Our goal is to help you see its potential, but also what’s involved in the process of setting it up, running it and keeping in updated, so you can make a decision on your own and see if that’s the right choice for you.
On our previous post, we covered the first out of five reasons small business owners feel they don’t need to get a website. While no business is too small for an online presence, owners would sometimes feel that’s the case when they take a look at larger corporations online. The trick, we stated, is to customize the website to your business’ needs. We take care of this by getting to know you and your venture.
However, if you’re not tech-savvy, the mere thought of getting a website up and running can be scary. How do you do that? What does it take? Is it expensive to get someone else to set it up for me?
To be honest, getting a website done involves at least three areas of expertise: someone who can design it so it looks appealing, a person from a hosting company to sell you the space and name where your website will be (which must be renewed at least yearly), and someone to customize it to your own needs. There are several providers you could go to for either of those, sorted by level of expertise, price range or your website needs: are you trying to set up an online store? Do you want to upload a portfolio or an inventory that can be accessed by anyone? Are you planning on getting a lot of pictures on it? Writing samples?
As you can tell by now, there are several decisions you must make on your own. Some service providers might be willing to help you figure out some of those questions, but many others will take advantage and offer whatever the most expensive option is. Since you must pay upfront for all of these services, there is very little room for negotiation afterwards.
Even when these aspects are covered and your website is finally online, neither of those providers will offer you to keep your site updated; that’s entirely on you. So if a product gets sold out, unless you go and change its availability by yourself, visitors will continue to see an outdated inventory. That’s not good.
Once small business owners realize how much it costs to get a website up and running, let alone keeping it updated, many of them rule the idea out. All payments must be done up front and picking a provider may be intimidating if you’re not tech-savvy. The whole ordeal seems so complicated!
That’s why here at Clicks & Mortar Websites we have come up with a solution: instead of paying a really high one-time fee to different providers, we’ve created different plans that split the cost into a monthly investment: you can take your pick; we can take care of just setting up the website and keep it updated (for example, making sure it looks good on a mobile browser), or we can also take care of its design, content updates, social media and making sure your site gets seen. We’ll meet with you and discuss what your best options are so you can make an informed decision. Give it a shot!