When someone tells me they need a website, the first question I ask is "Why?"
Quite often, this results in a very long pause, followed by an answer that leaves a lot to the imagination.
This is a huge problem. It's like building a house without knowing how many bedrooms you want. Going into a project like a website build without laying the proper groundwork is just asking for disaster, or at the very least, a major disappointment.
In this article, we're going to look at how to answer the question of why you want or need a website, and hopefully arrive at a place of clarity & purpose before you jump into a website project.
First, let's look at what a website's purpose actually is.
Primarily, a website is a vehicle for conveying information. At their most basic, websites perform the same function as physical pamphlets do - they present some important information and provide the reader the ability to act on the information by calling or emailing the pamphlet provider.
But a website is much more than that. Today, users expect to be able to actually do things on your website: sending you an email, booking an appointment, purchasing a product. The things your website allows your visitors to do is what I'll refer to as "functionality".
The best way to approach this is to think of your website as an employee. Let's call your website "Ted." Ted is a great hire that's willing and ready to work tirelessly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without ever complaining about breaks or his working environment. But Ted isn't a great multi-tasker. If you give Ted a bunch of duties, he'll inherently be mediocre at all of them, and may outright fail at some. So it's up to you, the boss, to hone in a very focused job description for Ted.
OK, so you don't have to call your website by "Ted" or anything else, but writing a job description for your website can help you understand exactly what your website needs to do and how it needs to be built to do those things incredibly.
Now you have the core foundation that should inform the entire process of building your site, but there are a few more building blocks needed before your structure is complete.
The most critical things you'll pile ontop of your foundation will be pieces of content. The reason the best websites look great isn't just because they have a great design with a clear purpose, it's because their content is also aligned with that purpose.
With the purpose well in hand, determine which pieces of information are critical to provide in order to achieve that purpose. If you're a restaurant and your goal is to generate online orders, you'll need a menu. If you're a consultancy and you want people to trust you, you'll need testimonials. If you're a website platform like PageSail and you want people to build better websites, you write articles like this.
As you write down each piece of content you'll need (don't start generating it yet, that's for later), consider one thing: Does my visitor care about this?
Where many website owners go wrong is they never ask themselves that question. Instead, they write content that they themselves care about. But your website isn't for you, is it? It's for the people who find it that want something from you. And those people don't care about your 1500 character backstory (most of the time) or pictures of your company picnic.
I know this is a tough one to swallow, but it really is important to get outside your head when you start working on content. Without these considerations, your website's purpose will get lost in a maze of irrelevant information.
Yes. But only if you're a web designer and developer.
I'm totally not joking. The rise of DIY site builders has empowered just about anyone to throw a website together. And if you've taken the previous sections in this article seriously, you're better prepared than almost everyone else to take on this task, even if web development isn't your lane.
All that being said, the DIY route results in one of two things most of the time: Either your website ends up looking exactly like someone who doesn't know how to build websites built it, or it looks incredible and exactly like hundreds of other websites.
Neither is a trade off I personally would want to accept. In fact, I think if you're faced with those two choices, you should fire up a Facebook page and skip a website. The Facebook page will allow you to do pretty much everything a mediocre website will do, without making it look like your website is an afterthought.
If you are, however, prepared to have a site built for you, it's time to get started.
You have some options, and they largely depend on budget.
If your site is a big, complex project and its jobs include selling products directly on the site or some other big piece of functionality, you should hire a web developer to build your site. There are a ton of agencies out there, and prices can range from $1200 (don't do that) to $15,000 and more.
A $1200 site is probably going to be only slightly better than one you built yourself, so make sure you have good examples of the web developer's work and are confident in their ability to deliver a product you're happy with. A more reasonable range for a small web developer building for a small business would be around $2500-$5000, depending on features.
For a lot of small businesses, even $1200 for a website is a bit too much. If you're in that boat, then I'd encourage you to look at PageSail. We are an inexpensive website platform that is not a DIY solution - we actually build your site for you. Because we keep the scope of sites very simple and very focused on your website's primary job, we're able to charge a low monthly fee for our service.
Ultimately, website decisions are personal ones. I hope that the information presented here will help you make the best choice for your business.