Web Sites Can Be the Answer You Are Looking For

Web Sites can be the answer your looking for, BUT think twice before you leap

Let’s step back up a bit and look at where and how businesses evolved as a web site on the internet.. Before the internet small businesses and large businesses too, were established in storefronts on main street USA, or in warehouses or factories. For the small business their market was limited to the local area or town they were established in. The internet gave the small business the opportunity to expand their market to a global one with unlimited opportunities to sell their products. How could you pass it up? Get a Web Site.

A business whether it be large or small is a very dynamic entity, especially so for the small business. What’s so dynamic about a small business or any business? CHANGE! Let’s look at a local gift shop, it has a product it wants to sell, so it displays it’s product in a particular place or a particular way based on what they want from it. To display as a reduced price leader, or product that would be considered for impulse buying, or for whatever other reasons they might have. They place products in the store front windows to entice customers or to highlight a particular line of products. They have sales to move slow moving product or just to try to improve cash flow. That’s this week, next week they find new and different products to sell in their store. Everything changes, the product in the store front window is removed and replaced with the new product, the floor display is changed to accommodate the new product line. The store clerks have orchestrated sales pitches to entice a customer to consider a certain product and hopefully close a sale, they revise their sales pitches to include the new product. Changes are made almost everyday.

The whole point is that there are many reasons for small businesses to make changes to give them a better chance to sell their products. OK, it’s time to go to the web site. All of the changes that are made in a main street store are going to need to be made on a web site also. One of the things lacking on a web site is the store employees that would cater to the customer and in some cases show a potential customer the fine point of a particular product or get them to handle it or to change the product displays. This doesn’t happen on a web site, so any web site has to be flexible enough so that changes necessary to the business can be made. These changes that are made on a web site can only be done through text or photos and their placement in the web site is as important as the text or photos themselves. There isn’t any human presence on the web site to assist.

There are many web site developers that can design very attractive (pretty) websites to catch a potential customers eye. They are experts in web design but not necessarily experts as to how a small business has to function (I found that out through expensive experience). So the fact that the web site developer you choose has designed some very attractive sites, it’s not enough. They have to be able and willing to design a site that will satisfy the functional needs of your business.
Unfortunately the way which is available to most of us to communicate what is necessary for our web site, is e-mail or the telephone, not the most easy or best way to communicate the details of your business needs. If you have a web site already that you may have attempted to build yourself might help if they would really look at it. Sometimes a designers ego gets in the way of the practicalities of a web design. Flexibility and the potential and means to make changes to a web site is paramount to a successful web site.

As an added bit of information, a web site is not necessarily the best place to test the salability of a product. If you have a product that is proven saleable then your ready to go to a web site. If not, you may not have any choice but to try a web site, it’s just a lot of work and expense to find out if your product will sell.