Why Paying Less for Web Design Actually Costs You Money
May 19, 2009 by Manager · Leave a Comment
If you’re establishing your first online presence, it’s tempting to cut corners by hiring the least costly web designer you can find. We’re all for price shopping to get a good price on a design you love, but heading straight for the lowest bidder can actually cost your business more money in the long run than you initially saved.
Here are a few reasons to consider design quality before you start comparing prices:
Poor-Quality Design Makes Your Business Look Bad
Imagine your website is a regular office space. If your customer walked in and saw old paint, no pictures on the walls, and tacky plastic office furniture, what kind of business would they think you run?
Your disinterest in your professional appearance shows that you’re not the sort of business that cares enough about your customers to put your best face forward. Now, of course you wouldn’t have a terrible-looking space in the real world. Your office would be professional and you would be well dressed to greet your clients.
So why would you make the mistake of allowing your website to have a shabby appearance?
Customers who aren’t impressed with your professional appearance, offline or online, won’t do business with you – period. If you want to keep their business, you need to put some energy into creating an impression that gives them confidence.
How Much Are Your Customers Worth?
The difference in price between a great website and a mediocre one often isn’t as much money as you think. Figure out the price difference between the best website design you can imagine and the mediocre designer you were willing to settle on hiring.
Now figure out how many customers you need to buy you that website.
Often, if your fantastic website design convinced just five customers to stick around and do business with you, your website will have paid for itself. Think about all the websites you’ve passed by because they weren’t up to your professional or personal standards. You passed them by because you weren’t willing to risk your money on them.
If those websites had invested in a better design, you might have bought from them.
That shiny website you buy for your own business needs can probably pay for itself inside a month. Every month after that, those extra customers your website brings in are more money in your pocket.
Getting a return on your initial investment every single month for the next year? That’s a no-brainer.
Design is Your First – and Often Only – Impression
They say you shouldn’t judge by first impressions, but the fact is that most online customers do just that. If your website doesn’t immediately give potential customers a good impression, they’ll move on in search of a business whose website does.
When you browse the web, the first thing you look at is the website’s design. Your eye takes in the whole look in a split second, and you get an immediate impression of the business. You might think, “Eh, these guys look pretty slapdash,” or you might land on a website that makes you think, “Wow, that’s impressive!”
Which do you want your customers to think about you?
The problem with that first impression is that you often never get another chance to make a second impression. Even if you come back with a better design next year, that customer has already dropped by – and left. Your potential client knew they didn’t like what they saw then, and they have no reason to believe anything has changed now.
The longer you wait to upgrade your web design, the more customers you’ve lost forever. Contact us today to start gaining customers, not losing them.
Why Your Offline Business Needs an Online Presence
May 19, 2009 by Manager · Leave a Comment
If you have a storefront business, commonly called a brick-and-mortar business, you may not see any reason to jump onto the online bandwagon. Your customers buy your services and products in person by coming to your place of business, and you’ve never had any trouble finding new customers. Besides, you don’t necessarily want to sell anything online.
What’s the point of having a website?
Brick-and-mortar businesses can’t ignore their online presence in favor of their storefronts. There are some serious benefits to an online presence that you may not be aware of – and almost all of them bring in more business for you in the real world off the web.
Your Customers Need to Find You
If you have a solid clientele, you may not be concerned about finding new customers. The trouble is that your new customers are they’re pretty concerned about finding you.
The number-one way people find businesses in their area today is through an online search. Increasingly, people turn to search engines like Google for the names of businesses that sell what they want. They search for addresses, phone numbers, store hours, and more.
If your business isn’t showing up when potential customers start searching for what you sell, you’re losing those customers to the competition. They say you can’t miss what you never had, but we say that’s just not true.
Here’s a story to underline the need for online presence:
One of our partners needed a new cabinet for a particular corner of her house. She went online and searched for furniture stores, finding three in her area. None of the businesses offered exactly what she wanted, so she finally settled on something she didn’t love.
A week later, a friend of hers took our client to a store she’d passed half a dozen times but never entered. In that store was just the cabinet she would have wanted – but she no longer needed one. If our client had found that store in her initial search online, that store would have gotten her money instead of the competitor.
Don’t let this be you. Make sure your customers know where you are, what you sell, and why you’re worth doing business with. When you get tons of new business, you’ll wonder why you missed out on having a website for so long.
You’ll Raise Your Legitimacy
It’s completely biased, but a common assumption these days is that if you don’t have an online presence, you’re not a legitimate business. If your competition has a website and you don’t, your competition is seen as a more established, credible business than you are – all for want of a www. URL and a simple design.
Your online presence also affords you a certain measure of simple customer service, which contributes to your legitimacy. People love being able to find out the hours their favorite store is open and have their basic questions answered via a simple web search.
It’s easier for both of you, and you’ve just provided your potential client with excellent customer service without ever raising a finger.
You’ll Increase Your Sales
It’s not necessary to build a complete online store. A basic profile page often does very well to boost sales and credibility.
That said, if you have one or two items that you know sell very well in your brick-and-mortar store, you can increase sales exponentially by offering these items for sale online.
One little restaurant we know sells an amazing spice tea on their menu. It was so popular they began bagging it and selling it to their customers, which worked brilliantly. When they began selling the same tea on their website, their sales increased fivefold.
Five times as many sales, all for making a simple online store that only sold one item. The restaurant now earns a hefty revenue on that tea, which helps fund improvements and renovations for the restaurant.
Think about it. What if you sold five times as many of a single popular item just because you sell it online? How would you improve your physical storefront with that revenue? How many new customers would these improvements bring to your business?
Having an online presence isn’t nearly as expensive as you might believe, either. Contact us today to discuss getting a website started for a price you can easily afford – and that pays for itself quickly by encouraging new customers to walk into your real-world business door.