To Web or Not to Web…that is a good question.

Not everybody needs a website. I know a few people who currently have more business than they can handle just from word of mouth, and they have no desire to increase their capacity. They are almost exclusively people who do what they do exceptionally well, and have an established, faithful, and committed clientele. They tell me it would be a waste of money and cyberspace for them to have a website, and they are correct in that assessment. That being said, not many people I know fall into that category.  Most, in fact, would like to grow their service or business and to do so will need more, new clientele, and for these, a web presence of some kind is going to be a necessity to move forward.

Owning a website is like owning a piece of real estate in cyberspace. The domain name you choose is like the lot address of your business, and the website you have built on that domain name is like the building you have built on an actual physical address in the real world. Many of the things that are important about actual real estate like your home or business are also important for this virtual real estate. One of the most frequently quoted mantras of the real estate industry is “location, location, location!” The location of a website is equally important and is determined by how it ranks on popular search engines. The best locations are those which appear on the first page of your potential customer’s internet search. Unlike the lot your home or business is built on, the virtual real estate your website is built on is constantly shifting as new websites are built and as search algorithms evolve. The process by which websites are moved to the more desirable locations is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is determined by the nature and quality of the website’s content, how fast or slow it loads, number of back links, keyword placement and a host of things which change about as often as the weather as search engine programmers change the algorithms the search engines use to rank the ever growing plethora of data on what we call the internet.

Another way in which websites are similar to your physical home or place of business, is that like a physical building it benefits tremendously from regular maintenance and periodic updating. Keeping your website looking fresh and up to date communicates to site visitors that the owner of that site (and by transitive property the owner of the service or business it is promoting) is on top of his or her game. On the other hand a website that is still promoting an event that happened two years ago, and is sporting antiquated design colors, tells the visitor to move along quickly, like they would through a run down, abandoned neighborhood.