In today’s online era, creating a website for your business is more of a necessity than ever before, as a majority of consumers do research online before making a purchase. Simply put: if you don’t have a website, you are losing potential custom.
However, building a business website can be a daunting prospect – potentially taking up a lot of your time and money. In order to keep things quick and simple, it’s important to evaluate your business needs and the best type of website to complement your aims. There are three main categories of business websites and each benefit different types of online presence:
- Simple, informative websites containing basic info on your business, products and/or services
- E-Commerce (or “online shop”) websites allowing you to sell products and/or services
- Content websites, often relying on a blog format
Basic informative sites are, as the name suggests, the simplest type of website to create, and usually take less time and money than the other options. If you’re looking for a no-frills way to take your business online and improve awareness of your business and your products and/or services, then this is the way to go.
While there are a growing number of cheap (or even free) services online to help you build a website, most of these are poor choices for your official business website. Services like Wix and Weebly do offer free basic website building, but these services are limited, and many features are locked off until you pay for the ‘premium’ options.
However, if you want to put your best foot forward online, you can get a custom-made, professional quality website by enlisting the help of a professional web developer.
E-commerce sites are an excellent way to sell your products and/or services online whilst staying independent of large companies like Amazon and eBay. Simply put, an e-commerce site allows you to sell your products and/or services to customers by displaying your catalogue and taking payments online.
There are a growing number of ways to take payment electronically, though integrating them into a professional website can be tricky. In order to solve this issue, a number of developers have rolled out plug-ins and services to allow you to sell online.
However, most of these services require you to pay a one-off fee or monthly subscription for the software, which can make starting an e-commerce site daunting. For example, WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin) charges £150+ for features like subscriptions and bookings, while Shopify charges £22 a month for their most basic plan.
While Shopify is easy to implement (being a hosted solution) and WooCommerce is highly customisable (with enough money and technical skills), you’ll probably be better off with a professionally made, bespoke solution.
One of the fastest-growing type of sites are content-heavy sites, often presented as blogs. These sites generally update regularly with content such as articles, guides and creative work. Many businesses use blog sites to market their products and/or services, driving brand engagement with helpful advice and thought-provoking articles.
While content-oriented sites are often quite easy to set-up (especially if most of your content is in text format), they require constant work to remain current. After all, people will lose interest in your content if you don’t make anything new for months on end.
So, if you’re willing to take a more active role in your business’ online presence, or have viewpoints and content that you’re more than willing to share with the world, a content-focussed website could be perfect for you! Furthermore, if your customers engage with the posted content, then you’ll be able to increase brand engagement and interest with far less expended money and effort than a traditional marketing campaign.
One of the most common ways of creating a content-oriented site is with WordPress, which is primarily aimed towards text-heavy blogging sites. However, creating a functional and professional site can be difficult if you’re inexperienced with web developing in general and WordPress in particular.
Hopefully, this guide has helped you to learn more about the ways in which you can take your business online, but if you’re still unsure of what will be best for your business needs, why not ask for some expert advice? Cleartwo has years of web developing experience across all business sectors and sizes of company, so contact us today for some expert advice and assistance with branding, design and I.T services.
You can reach a member of the Cleartwo team by calling our main office on 0161 285 0652 or sending an email to [email protected] for a no-obligation chat today.
