You Are Told That You Need A Professional and Self Hosted Web Presence
And not just a web site or a blog site but a professional web presence that is self-hosted with your own domain name representing your brand.
But what if you are already having a thriving Facebook community and thousands of followers on Twitter? Or may be you already have a blogsport site (most popular blog site) and a very successful offline local business. Do you still need a self-hosted site?
Why Do You Need A Functional And Professional Web Presence/Web Site?
There are many reasons why you would want to have an authority site online. Depending on who your target audience is and what you want to achieve with your web presence, here are a few factors to consider:
For Branding Purposes:
Corporate / Professional identity and online Market Authority or Leadership.
It tells others Who You are and What You do.
For Marketing Purposes:
• Lead Generation
• Communication with existing customer base.
• Communication with potential customers.
• For building relationships with customers and turning them into paying customers.
From A Business Point of View:
• Globalization – You can reach global and new audience. Hundreds of millions of users surf the net every day, you certainly do not want to miss out on this traffic.
• Changing Habits – people do their work, learn, shop and have fun on line. Your prospects want to check you out – online and you need a powerful, professionals presence (not just a static brochure site).
• For Sustainability and Ownership you want to have your own domain site and not build your entire business on social media platforms (which is on rented property and the landlord can chase you out anytime).
• It leverages on your time and resources so you get more done in less time.
With a Functional and Professional Web Site, you can achieve the following:
• Let others know about you, what your brand represents and what you offer.
• Showcase your service and expertise (or products).
• Have your own online asset, your home base where you provide a place for your community to connect and engage.
• Educate prospective clients and your community.
• Sell your product and/or service.
But How Do you Have A Professional And Effective Web Presence?
Through fanciful design and animated files? How about putting up lengthy pages on everything about the business on the site?
Having a professional web presence is not about putting up an exact copy of your physical brochure onto the net. Having lots of high resolution big photos or fanciful flash videos may also not accomplish the results you want (it may actually make it less effective).
Effective online or Digital Web Design needs to include functionality and usability as well as being visually attractive. A streamlined simple page that is searchable, accessible with easy navigation and is mobile ready will attract more human visitors and search engine bots. Often the work that is done behind the scene (not visible to the eye) is just as important as the visual design you see for a site to be optimized.
So the next time you want to give your web site a makeover or some renovations, you can make use of the above checklist. Your website has a job to accomplish and how you design it will affect the effectiveness of your online presence (the other critical component will be having the right kind of content).
If you’d like to set up your own website or have a website makeover, contact us for more details. If you want to set up your own website then check out these video tutorials and let us know if you have any questions.
P/S It’s not difficult to maintain your own blogsite or upload files. The result of getting more clients will be worth the effort