Small Businesses: Don't Fall Further Behind!

When surfing the web these days, you can find some great corporate websites, and with the advent of blogs, personal websites are taking off as well. But where are the small businesses? I'm talking about the local shops, stores, and services, and the small organizations too. Here’s an experiment… Go and grab your local yellow pages, dust it off, and open it to any section. Now the question is, how many of these small businesses do you think you can find on the web? Sure, there will be a handful of franchises which are simply listed on a corporate website, which I mentioned earlier. But as far as finding websites for the local businesses you see listed in the phone book, here’s probably what you will find…

• No website. It’s hard to believe that in this day and age, there are businesses or organizations which don’t have websites. There are those who say they just don’t have the time, they don’t have the money, or they just don’t know where to get started. In either case, they put it off a little longer.
  
• Homemade websites. There’s a certain unmistakable look to the do-it-yourself websites. Whether it’s that FrontPage Template style that half a million other websites used, or the hand-made cut-and-paste website style. I’ve got nothing at all against the people who take a shot at doing it themselves. In fact it’s a wonderful feeling of accomplishment to create your own website! But without the right guidance and the right tools for the job, taking on a project like this can end in frustration and wasted time. Even if a small business owner manages to develop his or her own website, the tasks of maintenance can be tedious too. As time goes on, these websites end up with an inconsistent look, hard to navigate menus, broken links, and out-of-date content. After a while, some of these website owners will realize the drain this is causing on their time, and they’ll either abandon the effort entirely or they’ll move on to the second type of website.
  
• Expensive looking website. Sounds good, right? Sure, you will find a few websites which are good-looking, great quality, with flashy graphics or animations, and in general are very professional looking. So you explore the site: About us, Company history, Contact info, etc. …yawn. That’s it? After that great first impression, where is the content? Where are the current specials, or upcoming events? Where are the articles or the current inventory, or maybe some comments from customers, or anything that is up-to-date? 
      The problem is that the professionally developed websites are expensive. Paying a web developer to design a website is like commissioning a work of art from an artist. It takes time, but after the long wait, you’ll have a nice looking landscape painting to hang on your wall. If websites were like paintings, there would be no need to ever update them… after all, who ever heard of making updates to an oil painting? “Can we take out those trees, move that mountain over there, and how about adding a happy little cloud over here?” This sounds silly, of course, but if you approach your web developer to make major changes to your website, it’s as if you’re asking them to change their “work of art,” and they’ll charge you a bundle for it!
      The result of all this is that the professionally designed websites tend to be once-and-done projects. That means steering clear of anything which is time sensitive, and having no ability to add or remove updates. In other words, these are boring websites, and visitors will rarely return.

So what is the solution? How can small businesses and organizations catch up? The answer is simple: SiteWing. Until now what’s been missing is the right tool for the right job. Now a small business can easily create a professional-looking website in a short amount of time, and maintenance is fast and effortless. From this point forward, small businesses no longer have any excuse for being behind everyone else on the web.