e-skills UK Guide

Choosing the right website for your business

Choosing a website

The vast majority of small businesses have some use for a website, either as an online advert or a more sophisticated online sales site. The problem is deciding on the best type of site for your business and then either building the site yourself or commissioning someone to build it for you. Whatever direction you choose remember that the vast majority of your current or potential customers will form their first opinions of your business from your website, so it is crucial that it does your business justice.

This guide explores the basic objectives of a small business website and will give you an idea of how to structure your approach to implementing a site. We cover the best way of getting a website actually built in these other guides - buying a website, designing a website and choosing someone to build your website.

The basic principles of websites

In the simplest terms a website is your shop window. A website can say more about a business than many people would believe and a poor website will turn people off your products very quickly.

Think about your experience of using the internet and visiting other people’s websites. The chances are that you have visited sites that you consider to be very good and have encouraged you to buy products. Other sites are bound to have been badly designed and probably put you off dealing with the company.

For a small business embarking on a website you will need to consider your business objectives. Do you want a site that can take orders and payments from customers or do you want a site that acts as an online advert? How many visitors are you expecting to come to your site? What do you think your customers are looking for? Do your potential customers use the internet and computers? If not you may want to consider whether a website is required at all.

By addressing questions such as these you should be able to put down some simple objectives for the site which will influence you on the basic site structure. Remember that a website is only one component in a marketing strategy, albeit an important one for many businesses. 

A website to generate leads

This is probably one of the easier sites to design. We are not looking at any sophisticated order taking pages, rather a way of representing what you do as a business and what products you sell. Naturally you will have in place contact details including phone numbers and email addresses.

This is similar to a printed catalogue that you may be issuing to customers anyway. That said, you will need to work with your site designer as building a good website is more complicated than simply copying an existing brochure to the web.

Building such a site is a good discipline in marketing as it forces you to think through the basic features and benefits of your products so that you can effectively articulate the messages to the site users. You may also want to show some of your expertise. This may be in the form of documents or papers people can down load or photographs of your products. You could also link the site to a forum or blog that you write. For more details look at our using blogs and using forums guides.

A website to generate sales

This is the natural extension of a lead generating site, as this time we are putting in place the mechanism to take orders. This type of site is one that many small businesses would be dreaming of – the idea that people can browse your products and place an order immediately for fulfilment the next day. It may mean that you can make money whilst you sleep!

Building such a site can be fairly complicated and the chances are you will need to take advice. The guide online transactions focuses on building a website to take orders.

The cost of a website

Most small businesses will use a third party to design their website. We explore this in more detail in the choosing someone to build a website guide. You will be paying for someone’s expertise in both design and implementation, and in many cases this could be money well spent. At the very least consider having a professional put your site together and then showing you how to make changes and updates.

Do not underestimate the importance of good site design. Many people may have an opinion on site design, but fewer are able to put together the right images and colours that will look good and reflect your business values. 

A basic site design can be put together in a few days and cost £600 - £1000. You can save considerable money by creating the content yourself and providing the designer with product descriptions and written content. A small business site used to sell products directly can easily cost £5,000 - £30,000 depending on how complicated it is.

The next cost is the setup and hosting of the website. This means putting the pages onto a computer linked to the internet. The vast majority of small businesses will use a third party to do this as it is technically complicated. Expect to pay about £150 - £200 per year for a basic marketing site. If you wish to take payments from your site then the costs will be higher. We cover these costs in detail in online transactions.