Ask any seasoned entrepreneur for the worst mistakes an SME could make in today’s competitive market, and you would expect a lack of online presence to appear very highly. Few areas of the business are considered as critical in today’s fast paced markets as having a website that accurately reflects the business.
However, if you look at SME websites, many are poorly designed and difficult to navigate. What does this say about that company to prospective customers? As a consumer, it is now a given that a website should be useful, add value and create a sense of what the brand represents. As such, the expectations of the average internet user have changed; many will buy from a company without ever meeting a business owner, purely based on the company website. As entrepreneurs, I am sure that you have been one of these consumers – whether you are looking for local plumbing services or buying presents online. However, despite rising consumer expectations, SME owners’ attitudes towards their own business website haven’t always reflected this.
At one end of the spectrum, you have SMEs that have embraced the web; recognising the low cost of acquisition and high reach that the web offers. At the other end, and generally where many smaller companies fall, there is a reluctance to fully enter into the online world. But where does this reluctance come from? Cost, especially in the current economic climate, is a key factor. Many businesses believe the myth that they will need significant budgets to procure the external services of a web designer to create and maintain a website. Rewind five years and this would have been true. Web designers had a monopoly over SMEs in terms of knowledge and skills and capitalised on this by adding a hefty price tag for their services. Fast forward to today, and there are many tools available to businesses that allow them to create, publish, host and manage their own website at a fraction of the cost, at least 80 per cent less than using the services of a web designer.
The next myth is that to build a website you have to have a degree in quantum physics - to register a domain name, understand the coding behind building a website and to find a suitable hosting facility. Again, much like the price of building and maintaining a website, things have moved on. Gone are the days when you needed to liaise with a handful of different suppliers to have a business website – designer, coder, domain registrar and an IT person to manage the infrastructure behind the site. There are now lots of suppliers that provide single solutions to encompass all these elements and, in many cases, business-owners can manage this themselves.
Finally, many believe that any website representing the business is better than no website at all. This isn’t necessarily the case. A website that is hard to find, full of typos, difficult to navigate or – worst of all – only half built, can have a more negative impact on the brand than no website at all. The website is a touch-point like any other – it needs the same attention to detail and quality as your direct mail, retail outlet, packaging and all the other elements that combine to create the right first impression of your business.
It is no longer acceptable for SMEs to rely on poorly designed and managed websites, believing that any web presence is better than none. The barriers to creating, hosting and managing a website have diminished significantly in recent years and today a fantastic looking, hosted website is within the budget and technical grasp of the masses, not the few.
Juan Lobato, CEO of BaseKit
