Guest author: Pete Wise
Small Business Website Design - How Do You Choose What's the Best Value?
Small Business Website Design - How Do You Choose What's the Best Value? By Pete Wise
There's no shortage of companies out there offering low cost website design for small or medium sized businesses. But how can you spot what's best for your business? As well as the obvious factor of low cost, it's important to work out exactly what you're getting for your money - and whether it meets your needs.
There are a number of criteria you need to take into consideration. Here are the most important.
The cost of the website itself
It's possible to find websites out there that cost next to nothing. They're the ones that are made from cheap, basic templates. The problem is that they nearly always look exactly that - cheap and basic.
Alternatively, you could opt for a fully customised site. This takes a little longer and costs a whole lot more. Beyond the budget of many small businesses in most cases.
A good compromise is to go for a template site, but one where the design can still be personalised to some extent. Look for a small business website provider with a good variety of templates to choose from, and which has a track record of creating attractive, individual looking sites.
The cost of the hosting and content management
This is very important to bear in mind. Some small business website providers will include the cost of hosting in the design for the first few months. But do check what it will cost when your free period is up.
Others will have a straight monthly fee. That's fine too. Though make sure you check out what it includes and what it doesn't.
Whether it's included or not, you'll always need to pay some kind of hosting fee. But it's essential to find out where you stand with content management. Will they add technical improvements to your site as time goes on? Will they charge you for them?
Most importantly, what if you want to change a page or add new ones? That great five or ten page website deal suddenly starts to look not so great if you're going to be charged every time you want to change a page or add a new one.
The most cost-effective deals are generally those which give you your own content management system (CMS). If it's a good company, your CMS will be easy to use and will let you upload copy and images in next to no time.
Not only will it save you the cost of paying to change content or upload a page, it will often be far quicker than if you had to brief someone and then check and amend their work.
Don't pay for what you don't need
Whatever website design and hosting you choose, beware of the company which is reluctant to tell you the cost upfront on their own website. They're the ones who are likely to make last minute additions to the bill, or to try and get you to buy extras you don't need when you contact them.
The classic extra is search engine optimization. This generally involves things like submitting your site to dozens of search engines plus various directories, adding a sitemap, generating a few backlinks and 'optimize' your various tags.
For that, you'll often pay around a thousand dollars minimum (or here in the UK, anything from several hundred to well over a thousand pounds).
But you know what? You needn't.
A good small business website design company will include things like a sitemap in the cost of your new website. They'll also write the tags, or tell you what you need to write for the tags if you have a CMS. (Tags are of almost zero importance when it comes to optimization anyway.)
Other things, such as submitting your site to lots of different search engines just aren't necessary. And still others, such as checking your ranking, are easy to do yourself.
The only thing that's worth paying extra for with most small businesses is for a search engine optimization copywriter. That's because the content of the site is the single most important factor in where it will rank on Google and the rest. Plus, you want your text to read well to potential customers.
Often, the best deals are to be found where you opt for both website design and optimized copy as a single package. It's a service I offer myself, and it costs less than if you were to pay for the writing separately.
How search engine friendly will your new website be?
How Google-friendly is the design you're thinking of buying? Is it well laid out and easy for customers (and search engine spiders) to navigate? Does it use search engine friendly coding? Is there a sitemap? (Sitemaps help visitors and search engines alike.) Is it compatible with all browsers and does it look good in all of them?
These are all factors in designing a successful website. Read the detail and check your prospective web designers are up to speed with them. Take a look at sites they've done for others. (What do you mean they don't show sites they've done for other people? Why ever not...?)
Choosing a small business website design company - conclusion
For most small businesses, the success of their website with both customers and search engines is going to be crucial to the success of the business as a whole. There's no shortage of small business website design companies out there to choose from, but be aware of what to look for and the pitfalls to avoid and your business will be halfway there. Good luck!
©Peter Wise
* Peter Wise is a freelance copywriter and SEO copywriter who also offers a complete website and copy package. Based in London, UK, he also writes ads, direct mail, brochures, newsletter articles and press releases. If you're looking for a freelance copywriter, please call 44 (0) 7767 687524 or visit http://www.ideaswise.com
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