Small Business Essentials - Build A Website

Everyone wants to know what your business web site address is. If you don't have one, it is almost treated as being suspicious, and perhaps your credibility as a company diminishes as a result. Most businesses still do not do any business selling on the web. So for these businesses who do not do any selling online, having a web site or not, really doesn't make any difference, as yours will very likely be lost amongst the millions of others. But as they say - "perception is reality". Therefore having some web presence is as essential in your small business as having an accounting software package.

So how does one go about building a web site? Besides outsourcing the build of a web site to someone else, it is really quite simple to build one. Outsourcing may be one answer, but sometimes the costs and the time required to translate your business message just isn't worth it. The other alternative is to buy a web building software package and do it yourself, which may be cheaper. Also you will not spend the time going back and forth between yourself as the business owner and the web designer to get your exact requirements as you would want to see them online.

The issue is how long and how complicated is the process if you decide to do this yourself?

There are a multitude of web design products available. Some require knowledge of HTML, the language that websites are built in and many do not. Naturally, if you are not fluent in HTML, I would avoid pure HTML only packages. Those that are not pure HTML based, use WYSIWIG ("what you see is what you get"). This means that you can merely drag and drop images and text, as you would in packages like MS-Word and the package itself will be able to translate your text and images into HTML for you. Much easier and the results are just as good as having the HTML code yourself. This is the route I would advise.

These WYSIWIG packages come delivered with many predefined templates or frameworks that you can choose from as a starting point to begin your website build. The templates can be adjusted to a certain extent to customize them to suit the look and feel that you may require for your small business online.

As far as time is concerned, not as long as you may believe. I have used a couple of these packages and have found that you can get a web site up and running within an hour or two including doing some basic personalizing and tweaking. Costs are also varied and by no means indicative of the capability of the package to meet your requirements. Sure you can get the best out there, but it may be overkill. I would suggest spending no more than $100 to purchase something adequate.

What would I suggest? 2 spring to mind immediately in the under $100 category.

Webeasy Pro 7.0

CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008

There are others, but these 2 are a good start to look at. Of course one can easily find others by doing an online search.

The beauty of both owning the web design software package and knowing how to use it is that you will then be able to make whatever changes you like to your website whenever you like and as often as you like with minimal cost and time. If you had outsourced the design and build, this would not be nearly as easy and as cost effective.

Mark Bergman has 25 years in business experience, covering areas of consulting in strategic planning and software and general business consulting. He also has started up a number of small businesses which he successfully ran and sold off. He has formal qualifications in both business and computer science. To learn more from Mark you can visit www.startupmysmallbusiness.com/blog.