Is Having a Website Important?
Is having a website important?
Here are some internet statistics that may surprise you:
In the year 2000, there were 361 million people online worldwide, by 2014, there were over 3billion, a growth rate of 764%.
Today, nearly half the world is online with a world population of 7.5 billion.
Around 90% of Australians have internet access, and over 80% of Australians have an internet ready smartphone.
There's an average of 3.3 internet connected devices per Australian, and on average we spend over 56 hours per month online.
The internet played a role in 64% of Australia’s total transactions last year, with $19 billion dollars spent online.
So, as you can see from those numbers, having a website greatly increases your chances of enhancing brand awareness, sales and helps with general business exposure.
Having a website that works for you
It’s one thing to have a website, but you need a website that works for you. You need a website that works in general.
There are over 1 billion websites online. You can’t just expect to start a bakery or a florist website and be on the first page of Google.
That’s where search engine optimization (or SEO) is important. Search engine optimization means that your website is super search engine friendly, allowing and in some cases pointing search engines towards relevant data.
While formatting and code play a large role in SEO, content is king. Google crawls your website analysing all the text and images, along with the structure of your website and ranks your website based on relevance to the users search, website structure and page speed.
Connecting your website through social media is a fantastic way to engage your customers and build a fan base, when someone likes your Facebook page or follows your Twitter page, that’s a potential customer at any given point, and is worth far more than most pay per click advertising because you can target promotions, events and sales directly to people that are interested in your products or services. The best thing about social networks is you can build your entire customer or fan base for free.
Google My Business is another great tool you should use parallel to your website. Have you ever done a search for something on Google and a few listings pop up first with the business details, phone, address and website address? That’s a business listing. They are also free to create and a fantastic way to enhance search presence, calls and website visits.
By linking your website with Google My Business, you can get a lot of relevant data to show up quite easily including your opening hours, contact details, location and most importantly a link to your website.
A website that works for you should rank well in search, look great, be easy to use, be jam packed with relevant business data and focus on visitor engagement.
What should a website have?
When is the last time you picked up a phonebook? Admittedly, a few of us still do occasionally pick up a phonebook to search for a business, or, a friend.
But the fact is most people turn to their smartphones or computers to find what they are looking for.
These people might be searching for your products or services directly; they could be searching for opening hours, prices, contact details, a location or even to learn more about you.
There are many other things to consider when choosing what to have on your website, like should it have an image gallery? Contact forms? Do I want to take bookings online? Do I want to sell products online? Do I want to be able to edit and change or add content or pages easily myself? There are so many things to consider, but are important to plan for.
Your website should be fast. Around 47% of people expect a website to load within 2 seconds, and 40% will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Website structure plays a large role in this, but hosting plays the biggest role. An Australian hosting company WITH Australian servers is the way to go to improve server response times, you also get better support as you aren’t constricted by timezones.
Your website should be responsive (meaning it works on all devices), there should be no additional fees for responsive design. In this day and age it’s just bad practice to not design responsive websites.
Website Builders vs Custom Built Websites
Website builders have their advantages. For instance, in most cases they are cheap and are usually very easy to use. There are a lot of downfalls though, for instance, usually you are stuck with their hosting, and most companies servers are in America due to costs and this affects the speed of your website when loaded in Australia.
Another issue with website builders is sometimes they have a negative effect on SEO, usually they have custom blocks or elements that search engines don’t recognise. While you can create an aesthetically pleasing website chances are search engines won’t see it that way. Also, quite often they aren’t very responsive, which means they look great on computers but don’t scale for smaller devices like tablets and smartphones.
The biggest drawback would be functionality. You are limited to whatever they provide, with very little wriggle room for custom feature development.
How much do websites cost?
A good website can cost anywhere from $500 in excess of $50,000.
If you want a basic website with a few pages, and are happy to leave your designer or developer in charge of changing content and managing things (which usually costs a lot more in the long run), you’re looking at between $500 to $1000 for a basic functionality website, that may include an image carousel and a contact form and a couple of things like that, but not much else, and the constant overhead of paying someone to make changes to content.
If you want something built on a CMS or Content Management System (Widebay Websites use Wordpress, and recommends it strongly), that will give you the ability to add, edit or delete content, images, pages, blog posts and many other things with relative ease. It’s easier to keep updated, as new versions come out you get update notifications that you can click on and update yourself. That will cost you anywhere from $1,000 onward depending on your feature requirements.
Websites are an expensive investment, but well worth it if done properly. Few agencies allow you to pay off your website, there are some, though.Widebay Websites do website packages for NEIS groups starting from $50 per week to help with the initial overhead costs.