What Website?

Hopefully, the information below will help you some way towards understanding the website choices available. Please take a moment to read my article, “SEO In English”. This will help you to better understand the bigger picture.

What Website?

When it comes to getting your business online, it is important that you choose the right type of website.

Below you will find information that will help you to understand the differences between the more common business solutions.

Brochure Websites

Often the simplest and most cost effective web solution, a brochure website is generally recommended for small businesses and start up businesses. A brochure website can be a static website or a content management system.

A brochure website best suits a business that wants to provide information too or generate leads from its customers and users. It can be used to take payments for products directly but is really only suitable if your product range is small.

Examples of the type of business that might require this type of website are:-

Local service type industries such as builders, tradesmen, accountants, surveyors etc.

A brochure website can also be a cost effective way to get a start up business online.

CMS’s – Content Management Systems

A content managements system will not meet the needs of all businesses but can be adapted to suit the needs of many SME’s. The CMS, is quite often the platform that I recommend for start up, small, local and even some medium sized businesses.

It is not possible to explain them all in this short overview so I’ll just go over the main benefits.

Why re-invent the wheel?

A CMS can be built for you but there are already many, good CMS platforms ,tools and templates available for free. Using these takes away a lot of design costs and allows your budget to be spent on far more important things in the early days.

Design is of course very important but in my opinion should be placed second to delivering traffic and business. Starting out like this is cost effective but future investment in your brand and SEO is still very important.

A CMS allows a great deal of flexibilty.

With a CMS, the content of the website is seperated from the programming and theme. This means that the theme or template can be completely changed with little if any impact on the content.

For that unique design, a custom template can be built. Programming and functionality can also be custom built or added through a wide range of free and paid addons.

The main benefit of the CMS, is that you can log into your own website and add too or edit the content with ease. Of course, not all web designers/developers will grant you access to your website files, so be sure to check if you would like access.

Ecommerce – Online Store

Want to showcase your products online and sell, sell, sell? Then you are likely going to need an online store.

As with the CMS the cost of an online store can be reduced or delayed by using one of a number of pre-built platforms. Just like the CMS your online store can be built for you or a pre-built platform adapted to your needs.

There are free and paid platforms available but they have much more programming as they carry out a much wider range of tasks. For that reason, an ecommerce set up is a rather more expensive undertaking.

If you are using an off the shelf system, carefull consideration of your short and long term needs is important. Each framework will have common basic functionalities, like add to basket but some will have extended functionality that is not available in others.

Recommended reading.

SEO In English

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