KonzeptioNerd

How Much Website Do You Need (if You’re a Small to Mid-range company)?

A pro pos of a small meme over at techdirt: You Mean Small Businesses Can Succeed Without Web Sites? … Carlo Longino and a few commenters along with him believe that (having to set up and run) a website may not benefit and may actually be detrimental to small businesses.

I kind of disagree. A website may not be “the silver bullet that will make a small business become successful.” It’s not a sufficient prerequisite. But websites are quickly becoming necessary prerequisites & here’s why (and it’s not even about selling your goods online):

Visibility, visibility, visibility!

Small shop, not quite central location, odd or irregular opening hours? You’ll need a central, accessible place to store your location, contact information and opening hours. Yellow pages or other (online) listings will not do, because you don’t control the data there. And if you have do wait for changes to trickle down through half a dozen listing services before your clients get to know what’s up, you’re losing traffic.

For example …

As a concept developer, I don’t usually create full websites, but I recently relaunched the site of one of my favorite restaurants, the Lua Ruby September in Frankfurt. The Lua is situated just outside one of Frankfurt’s major dinner and nightlife hubs. They recently moved from a larger place across the street to a more charming, smaller location. And because summer arrived early this year, they just changed their opening hours. Without a website of their own, there’s a good chance that either they wouldn’t be found at all or hungry patrons would queue before closed doors once too often.

So, how Much Website Do You Need (if You’re a Small to Mid-range restaurant)?

A very basic website will already give you the chance to control - and this means: update in a timely manner - the data your clients need to find you:

• opening hours, to begin with
• a telephone number
• a street address is less likely to change, but while your potential guests are on your site, why not mention it and throw in a link to a routing serivice like Map 24 or Google Maps.

Of course, you’d want all this on a site that is cross-browser compatible, has validating (= fast loading, error-free) code and small bandwidth-friendly images. This is where the requirements go beyond what your younger cousin is likely to manage during summer break.

So, if you’re going to invest in a pro, anyway, you might as well get some sort of content management system that allows you to update sections of your site without having to call either the cousin or the pro.

Next thing for visibility is making friends with search engines. Of course, you wouldn’t just want to keep your regular clients up to date but also become easily findable for all those who’ve only heard about you. Search engines love (besides well-structured documents and human readable URLs) content. So, adding a few more pages to describe your business will not hurt, either.

If you’ve invested in a tool to manage your content, you might as well include those additional content-pages and make them editable. This way, if you change your menu or add to your selection, you can quickly make some changes to your site. Get in the experts when you need them, but try to get the tools you need for basic maintenance yourself.

And if you decide to get a site with a handful of pages and a content management tool, start thinking about a blog. A blog is basically a way of getting thought or news published in a timely manner. And as blogs cause frequent content change on a website, search engines love blogs. Devoting some of your expensive time to blogging will eventually improve your visibility.

At the moment, just under 60% of Germans are only and increasingly using the web as their primary source of information. You’d have to be pretty darn specialized and exclusive to afford low visibility in this medium.

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