What is a website?

Ok, time for business 101. It’s not very controversial anymore to say that every company should have a website. Regardless of industry, business model, geography, or target customer, today’s world operates online.

 

As of 2018, nearly 90% of buying decisions start online, and the majority on search engines like Google. Despite this fact, close to 40% of small businesses don’t have a company website. From a business perspective, this represents an absolutely crazy number of missed revenue opportunities.

 

What is a website?

 

At it’s core, a website is simply a digital representation of your organization. A place with a digital “address,” where clients and potential customers can “visit” to learn more about a company or interact with it.

 

It’s a place where people can gather information about your products or services that informs the process in which they choose where to spend their money. So the question really becomes, do you want that site visitor to spend their money with you or your competition?

 

What is it for?

 

Deciding what the purpose of your website actually is will determine not only how it’s designed and built, but also how visitors interact with it.

 

Should they be able to purchase your goods and services directly from the site? Do you just want to show them who you are and what you stand for? Is your website going to serve in a strictly customer-service capacity?

 

This is where it gets a little more tricky. You see, there’s no right answer to this question. This is where you get to determine what is best for your business. There are extremely successful retail operations that have no ecommerce functionality on their site. There are customer-service firms that don’t offer online customer service. There are plenty of companies who have very simple sites that offer no online services.

 

But the possibility exists for you to add 100% of the capability of any brick-and-mortar location directly to your website. Quite literally, any transaction or communication can be completed over your site now.

 

How to decide?

 

Deciding to have a website is obviously the first step (is this even a decision, anymore?), followed closely by what it is you want the objective of your site to be. This decision could be an easy one for your company, depending on your business model. Or it could be much more complex, taking into account any number of factors. If you’re not sure exactly which features and functions would be beneficial to include on your site, you should contact an expert. They should use their experience in the digital field to translate your expertise in your company to an online medium.

 

Once you have your website up with it’s ideal functionality, you can optimize it to rank better on the search engines, and be back to the business of growing your organization.

 

 

 

MediaWorks Digital is a hometown agency focused exclusively on helping small businesses in Denver, Aurora, Arvada, Golden, Lakewood, Colorado Springs, and across Colorado. We specialize in effective web design, development, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and content marketing. Value is always a priority, and we don’t rely on one-sized-fits all web packages, quirky gimmicks, or hard sales. We are a partner in small-business success. Contact us today to see how we can help.