The Web Presence Dilemma

Your business needs a web site, but you're no expert. Where do you turn?

Instinct may say this is the perfect job for your nephew taking a college web design class, or your neighbor the high-school whiz who spends most of his time playing World of Warcraft, and mows your lawn on Sundays.

No offense to them, I'm sure they're great kids. But there are about a million reasons why this is a poor choice. Let's start off by understanding why you wanted to pick them to begin with.

Perhaps for starters you really didn't know where else to turn. You know you could look up web design firms online or through some other media, but that seems so impersonal. And you want to help out those kids.

You also really want to save money. You don't want to spend a lot of cash getting your web site up and running. After all, it's just another necessity of doing business. You may think of it a little like a fax machine. You know you need one, though you're not sure exactly why. A fax machine probably never directly made you cash, but still it seems essential.

Well I have two pieces of news for you. First of all, fax machines are outdated. Get an online service to fax through (yes, I know that was totally random and off topic). Second, your take on web sites is equally antiquated. If you put forth the effort to establish a powerful web presence, it will dramatically impact your bottom line. Yes it will absolutely put cash in the bank for you.

If you think you're business is different, I'm sorry to tell you that you're wrong. No matter what your business, you can obtain substantial financial advantage from the web. You may not be able to sell products or services directly online, but that doesn't mean your web site won't pull in paying customers that you could not capture any other way.

The sad reality is that most web sites are roadside billboards on an untraveled road that leads nowhere. They were built by people with who might have a good eye for design, but no experience marketing on the internet. It takes an experienced marketer to truly understand what is needed to create a solid web presence, drive traffic to it, capture leads, and convert leads into paying customers.

Only with all of this can you truly obtain web presence over a simple web site. It's true that coordinating and creating all of this will cost more time and money up front than paying your nephew to throw some HTML out with your logo on the pages. But if done correctly it will also drastically improve your bottom line.

So what costs more, a web site that draws no customers, or a solid web presence that generates consistent business, but has more start-up costs?

Let a professional handle your web presence, from the ground up.

Jeffrey M. Mims is a management consultant and web presence expert. He is the Executive Director of Mims Innovations, Inc., a turnkey provider for fully-managed web presence solutions. For more information on Web Presence, see Jeff's article What is Web Presence.