If you think your business wouldn’t gain any benefits from an online presence, then it’s time to think again! You might feel that you are offering a niche service for people in your local area, and therefore don’t have any need to advertise, or perhaps you run a small shop and rely on passing trade. A website may seem as though it would be a waste of money, but you could be limiting your business prospects quite severely by trying to function without one.
Too small, too local?
The Guardian Small Business Network estimates that well over half of all small businesses in the UK have failed to establish an online presence, which seems a startling number in this technological era.
Many small local business owners believe that word of mouth is sufficient to bring in appropriate number of new customers and believe that having a website will create floods of orders that cannot be fulfilled. Of course, this is unlikely to be the case, but surely the aim of every business is to grow and make increasingly large profits. If you’re taking on more new customers than you can cope with then it’s time to take on new staff and increase the size of your business.
According to a blog post on Superweb, a good website helps to give your business credibility. Nowadays people use their smartphones, tablets and laptops to source products and services – even local ones – rather than more traditional methods such as the phone directory or local advertising media.
The internet has made us all more interested in finding out about the people we are dealing with. If you provide a service but have no website to inform customers about who you are and why they should choose you, then they are likely to prefer your competitor, who does offer this information through a professional and accessible website. If you don’t have so much as a web page to introduce yourself then you might as well not exist.
Keep it professional
Of course, another key factor for the small business owner or sole trader is that of cost. Yet a good website shouldn’t be viewed as an expense so much as an investment. A professionally designed site doesn’t have to extend beyond a single page, yet it lends your business great credibility and exudes professionalism, ensuring customer confidence in your goods and services.
If you’re lucky enough to live within the Gloucestershire area then you can try the services of https://www.bugfinders.com who undertake the secondary aspect to sites which is testing its usability known as software testing.
Now that the telephone directory has fallen out of favour as a means of sourcing products and services, failure to invest in a professional website is a false economy. Times have changed, and all businesses must embrace the digital world or risk extinction.