If you’re a business owner, I’m sure you’ve heard about the power of websites. Yet, 45% of small businesses still do not have a website.1
In a recent article, 5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website, I went over why every business should build a website, and how they can benefit from one. If you haven’t read that yet, you can read it here.
In this, I’m going to go over common objections people have to building a website, as well as why websites are still useful and needed for each case.
1: Isn’t Facebook enough?
A common objection to building a business website is that Facebook is enough. It lets them communicate to their customers and and makes them find-able, right?
Well, kind of.
While Facebook is a great tool to utilize in your marketing efforts, it can’t fill in the spot of your website. While Facebook lets you communicate with your customers, it doesn’t make you perfectly visable. If you’re a local bakery who wants to show up for “[Your Town] bakery,” your Facebook page just might not show up when someone presses enter.
Second, Facebook allows you to do Facebook ads, but it ends there. Websites are the essential piece that marketing plans revolve around now.
Finally, with just a Facebook page, people will view your business as less professional. A statistic I quoted in the 5 Reasons your Small Business Needs a Website article is that 30% of consumers won’t even consider purchasing from a business that doesn’t have a website.
2: My Customers aren’t online.
While this may make sense on the surface, as you go deeper, this argument falls apart.
Another statistic I quoted in the 5 Reasons article is that 97% of consumers go online to find and research businesses. And when do people look for and research business?
When they’re about to buy.
Another hole in this argument is that desktop computers and laptops aren’t the only devices that go online. Every phone that can access the internet can be used to learn about and interact with businesses. And people do use their phones, in fact, in 2016, mobile web traffic grew past desktop web traffic.
3: Websites are complicated and expensive.
They definitely can be both of these. If you wanted to code it from scratch, you’d have to learn HTML, CSS, and probably JavaScript, an intimidating prospect for most people.
Yet, now there are website builders. This very site uses WordPress to manage all of its content. Website builders make it easier for an average Joe to create a website.
But, there’s only so far you can go by yourself. Unless you want to spend hours learning the same languages you were trying to avoid to tweak little things on your site, play around with colors to represent your brand the best, and make your site mobile-responsive with CSS media queries, you’re probably going to want to hire a developer.
Developers can build your site for you, much better and faster.
Hiring a developer to build your website is a great example of a comparative advantage. They work on what they do best, using the skills they’ve been honing for years, and you receive more time to do the things that you do best.
Okay, we’ve established that hiring a good developer can remove the complexity from the equation, but doesn’t that get expensive quickly?
Yes, according to this calculator, even a simple brochure site can cost $8,000-$12,000.
Yet, there are several things you can do to reduce that cost/risk significantly. You could hire a beginner-intermediate developer instead of an expert. They’ll still give you a huge bang for your buck, at a reduced cost.
You can ask for a demo before committing to signing a contract, this lets you test the developer before jumping in.
And, when you compare the cost of a site to its benefits, you realize that a site could pay for itself in just a few months.
The End
After reading this article, you should know that websites are essential for any business to succeed now and in the future.
If you haven’t read my 5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website article, here it is.
If you’re wondering what the next step is in building a professional website, contact me, and we can chat about a demo.