Websites for NZ Small Business

This site is born of frustration. I have been in the online business for a number of years  and I know that  a business’s website has only one  purposes:  to drive new customers to your business and improve your bottom line profit. But very few New Zealand businesses’s websites seem to be doing that for their owners.  Few of the  small businesses I use on a day-to-day basis had a useful website that I could find. Yet it was small business that should be embracing the level playing  field and low cost of entry that the Internet offers them.  Times are tough –  businesses are struggling - but they are not using the most cost-effective form of advertising every invented? I wanted to know why.

I found stunningly beautiful sites – sites which would never be found in the search engines because the search engines only read text, not pictures,however beautiful.  Neither would your  potential customer because they would have got bored waiting for the site to load and moved on to your competitor’s site.

I found other sites that I  hope no potential customer has ever found – they are so ugly, so amateurish, so 1999, that they are pretty much an embarassment to the company that owns them.  You wouldn’t ask your  teenager to write your business’s advertisement in the local paper – but it seems that plenty of New Zealand business owners are quite happy to do that for their website!  And again the search engines would struggle to understand what the site was about.

Whether the website is  ugly  or a stunningly beautiful unique design – it doesn’t matter – if the site is not being found by your potential customers – its of no use to you and its not paying for its keep. You wouldn’t pay money on advertising in a magazine that no one read – so why pay for a website that no one can find ?

Yet the value of a good website to  a small business is almost  incalculable. Its a 24 hour ad – which runs  year around – without you doing a thing to it! If you set it up right it can keep in contact with your customers, collect sales leads for you, inform you customers of new deals and specials, even be your online shop front to not just New Zealand – but the whole world.

Now New Zealand is known for its innovative  small and medium sized businesses so why, when I talked to friends and business owners, did I get lots of requests about me “doing something” with their websites. So out of curiosity I got out the Yellow Pages – you know that book you probably spend thousands a year to advertise your business (I find it a useful laptop stand – thanks)  - and looked for people offering business the service of i developing websites that would drive customers to their business. I couldn’t find any. Well that’s not quite true – I found a few – but most only offered part of the solution, and the few that offered a bigger part of the solution were charging prices most small businesses can’t afford.

I found plenty of businesses that would give you a beautiful bespoke design – probably at a beautiful bespoke price – they didn’t mention price. They didn’t mention Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or getting your website on page 1 of Google. They didn’t have ways for your customers to sign-up for updates, and update that you can send out for a fraction of the price of a mail out.

I found plenty of businesses which offered you cheape(er) options where you could even update your own website – but at closer inspection – you had to use their software, if you decided you didn’t want to use their services anymore (or they stopped trading) then your website would be history.

I found a very few businesses that were offering the whole package:

• a user friendly website that presents your company well and gives you the opportunity to capture enquirers’ details  and also build a (legal) mailing list;
• a website that you can update and change as you need to;
• clarity about who owned your domain name (it should be you) and whether the software the site ran on would run on pretty much any hosting platform (it should);
• ongoing support for the website’s technology, clear upgrade path so you can upgrade your website as your business grows,
• a plan to rank your website in the New Zealand and international search engines;
• a way to turn browsers into buyers – collecting customer details legally and in a way that will make them want to hear from your business again;
• a plan to develop a social media presence for your company.

So decided to offer the service myself. I develop websites for myself and for others.  I know how to rank a website in the search engines – I’ve done it plenty of times. Social media are fast evolving but if you are in the right industry Twitter and Facebook  can be a great way to connect to your customers – again very cost effectively.

Check out the links below  to see my services and prices  in detail.