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Many small business owners are reluctant to talk to a technology consulting firm before they create their own website.
“It’s so easy for me to create my own website, why do I need to pay money to a technology consulting firm or a website consulting agency? I’m not going to do it!”
It’s certainly true that one of the greatest boons to the small businessperson was when website hosts started offering website builders like Wix, WordPress or Dreamweaver, so that people with no knowledge of coding could make their own website. Or some will opt in for an inexpensive boiler-plate template website that uses the same exact layout for any type of business and they just stick their text and images in there.
The bottom line is those types of websites are not developed based on real world research into 1) how your customers are searching for you and 2) what visitors need to see immediately upon landing on your home page to keep them there and not bounce (hit the back key).
It saves them a lot of money on website creation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily do anything for their business.
That’s because business people typically know very little about how to design a website to be of maximum use to a visitor, or how to write the content for it that will convert visitors into sales. They don’t know about keywords and how the proper keywords tie back to search engine optimization which enables their site/business to be found on the web.
That’s where talking with a technology consulting firm or at the very least a website consulting agency just makes good cents. And sense.
For example, I once had a client who insisted that the keyword for all articles written for him – for SEO purposes, mark you – be…the name of his business.
I tried to explain that if people already know the name of his business, they will do a search on that specific name, to get the address or opening hours or what have you. And his website would come up at the top of SERPs because his business website is ranked somewhere in a search engine. It may be ranked at the very bottom, sixty pages behind every other business website that offers his same services, but if someone searches on that exact name, it will show up in position 1 on page 1.
But let’s say his company manufacturers red and green widgeridoos. If someone wants to buy red and green widgeridoos but doesn’t know who makes them, he or she cannot search for a company name. He or she will search for “red and green widgeridoos”, and because this client had not built backlinks for “red and green widgeridoos”, all his rival widgeridoo makers will show up in the search engine results, and his site will lose their business.
In other words, a business needs to optimize its website and create backlinks not for people who already know about the business and its products, but for those who don’t.
That’s an example regarding SEO, but the principle I’m trying to illustrate goes across all disciplines.
It’s simple.
People don’t know what they don’t know.
They may think they know, but unless they have years of experience with web design and web coding, they don’t really know what’s needed, or what’s possible, when it comes to designing a business website that will convert site visitors into customers or clients. This is where it’s important to utilize a professional website designer to ensure your ROI on the investment in a website pays large dividends.
The Dilemma of choosing the right E-Commerce Platform
Many small business people want to open a store or an e-commerce site. But there are a lot of e-commerce platforms out there – Shopify, Squarespace, Magento, WooCommerce and so on.
Which E-commerce solution would be best for the product(s) they’re trying to sell?
What if they don’t have time to do the research? What if they choose one platform on the advice of friends and then, after they’d invested funds and spent time creating their site, they learn that it simply doesn’t suit their needs.
Then they have to seek out another e-commerce platform, and spend time recreating their site.
That’s a lot of time, effort and hundreds of dollars wasted.
Big companies, bigger technology problems
Now let’s increase the stakes.
Let’s say that you are expanding your chemical company. You want to sell products on line, but you’ve looked at those drag-and-drop e-commerce platforms and you know they’re not for you.
But what type of web technology is for you?
You need to tie your products into your ERP systems and inventory systems.
Some of the chemicals you sell need to be shipped in refrigerated trucks, and some may not, but you’ve got customers who will order both types of chemicals at the same time.
So, you know what you need your site to accomplish, but you don’t know if it’s possible to code a site that will allow you to accomplish that. You haven’t even heard of html, let alone PHP, .NET, Python or Ruby on Rails.
You’re thinking of putting together a Request for Proposals in order to seek out the most qualified website designer you can, but you’re not sure what to put in it because you don’t know what is possible and what’s not.
And you probably also don’t know how long it should take for a website designer to code such a sophisticated site, or how often they should report progress to you, and so on.
And the last thing you want to do is hire a company to create your site, only to find out that you don’t have enough features and the site is not scalable, because you didn’t know all the questions for which you needed answers.
That would run into thousands of dollars, and months of work wasted.
The Solution: A Technology Consultant
Web Casa offers a technology consultant service that will help take the stress and confusion out of finding a designer for your business website, whether it’s a simple as choosing the best drag-and-drop e-commerce platform to sell t-shirts, or a sophisticated and powerful site for a multi-million-dollar corporation dealing in chemicals, financial services, or any of a host of other business niches.
We will meet with you face to face and ‘peel the onion,’ so to speak, of your processes. Once we are completely familiar with your business and what you need at present and what you may need in the future, we will put together the formal RFP for you.
With an RFP or a blueprint that truly reflects your needs, you will receive proposals from developers who truly understand what you want, and who will be able to give you accurate quotes for time and budget.
An accurate RFP solves many problems. An experienced technology consultant can help you create the perfect blueprint to ensure your success online.
