Five years £349 would buy you a fairly standard small business Website, with a few static pages, some stock images and maybe a contact form.
But what’s happened now is, rather than the whole economy shift and change and the financial bar lowered, the £349 website still exists but now has to compete with businesses offering their services at £49.
The thing is, investing £49 in your online presence shows off pretty starkly your commitment to making the Web a place to do business. Now that doesn’t mean you should spend thousands, it actually doesn’t mean you should spend more than £20, but it’s what you do with that £20 that counts.
wordpress.com will let you host your own content managed site for free, and if you want your own domain name (like thisismywebsite.com) you pay a small amount for the privilege. There are tonnes of themes available which you can customise.
What you get with something like a wordpress.com site is a Web presence that’s instantly connected. When you post a blog entry that you’ve tagged with keywords, people searching for those keywords will find it weeks before a standard site, because of the technology that blog engines employ.
wordpress.com is a great starting point, but it won’t, and can’t last you forever. As your business grows, your site needs to grow with it, and you need to think about making a real investment in the Web.
Companies offering £49 for a Website are great for personal sites, but why bother when Facebook and MySpace exist? If you want to get anything out of the Internet, become part of a community and engage with your customers, you won’t get it unless you invest either a little time or a little more money.
The bottom line is, if you’re spending less than £300 on a Website, you may aswell spend £20 on a WordPress blog that has your own domain name, because you’ll get more out of it: more visitors, more discussions and a greater understanding from your customers about what your business can do for them.
The Web is like any other place: you get out what you put in; the only difference is that by putting in a little in the right place, you can get more out than you expected.
