Building a Web site involves a lot of decisions. You have to choose among different platforms, designs, features, domain names.....but, wait a minute. Let's back up a bit. Are you sure you really want to do this?

Web development companies have a habit of ignoring this question, instead just assuming that expanding onto the Web is exactly what everyone needs. However, for those that need a little more convincing, ARank1 gives you five reasons why a Web presence can take your business in new directions.

1. Ease Customer Contact
When a customer wants to get in touch with your business, they're increasingly likely to try and find a Web site. Just having an email address isn't enough. With no single, reliable directory of email addresses, customers will look for a Web site first.

Think about it: if I want the email address for Joe's Bait Shop, how am I going to find it? Well, first, I'll try to find a Web site for Joe's Bait Shop. Without a Web site, how many customers is your business missing?

By ensuring your site is well-listed on Internet search engines, you can create a whole new stream of customers. Often, a potential customer will just enter the item they're searching for into an engine like Google or Yahoo and start browsing through the results. Smart business owners will ensure their business is listed among those results.

2. Promote Your Product
With your own Web site, you can explain in words and pictures exactly what your product does and why it's worth purchasing.

You can go into as much detail or as little as you like without worrying about printing costs, how many colors you're using, or how much the presentation will cost to bulk mail. If you carry many products, an online catalog system can categorize and display your products in a way that enourages users to browse.

Changes to your online catalog are quick, simple, and done in real-time. Do you have a catalog now? How much do you spend printing and shipping it? How much time and money do you have to spend whenever you want to change something? With an online administration interface, you change things when you want them changed with no delay.

3. Sell Your Product
Once you've convinced your customer that this product is what they need, you can provide an online ordering system.

You customer selects the products he or she wants to buy, enters credit card and shipping information, and processes the order. The system will calculate applicable sales tax, shipping costs, and can even be programmed to allow for special promotions and upselling to higher margin items.

The system can either log orders and allow to complete then using your existing process, or it can actually bill credit cards automatically in real time, leaving you nothing to do but ship the product to the customer.

4. Provide Support After the Sale
Once you sell a customer your product or service, you can use your Web site to provide them with information or services to enhance that purchase.

How many support calls can be avoided by having all your product manuals available for download on your Web site? How many frequently asked questions can you eliminate by publishing them on the Web?

You can take this one step further by giving customers an interactive help system on your site. Allow them to open help tickets that get queued for work by your support representatives. How much phone call volume can you transfer to email? How many minutes of waiting on hold can you eliminate for your customers? Remember that Web-based support can be worked on-site or off, ideal for offices with a space crunch.

5. Build Customer Loyalty and Community
A good Web site will provide reasons for people to visit apart from the need to sell a product or service.

By providing content ancillary to your product, you build traffic from people interested in what you provide. When the time comes for these people to spend money, you have a pre-existing relationship on which to build. Content can be a simple as links to sites of interest to your customers or as in-depth as an online community with message boards and chat rooms.

For instance, say you own a hobby store that sells remote control airplanes. You can certainly build a Web site that displays your catalog and allows online purchasing, but the smart store owner would go one step further and try to build some community for remote control airplane enthusiasts. A page of links to good resources on the Web, reviews of new products, a listing of upcoming events, and a message board for enthusiasts to talk about their hobby would create a site which would attract customers interested in what you sell. There's a good chance they'd visit your site every week or so to catch up on items that interest them. When they get ready to actually make a purchase, what site do you think they'll turn to first?

We could go on and on about how the Internet could revolutionize how you do business, but these reasons should give you a good idea about where the Web can take you. Every business is different however, and if you'd like to talk about this a little further, contact us and we'll be happy to examine what you do and tell you how we can help. Contact Us