- Take advantage of inexpensive advertisement. Once the initial programming and design is finished, a website is the cheapest (and perhaps most effective) source of advertisement.
- Allow new clients and customers to find you. One of us literally heard a friend offer up a phone book for kindling at a bonfire, proclaiming, “What else are we going to use it for?”. In fact, there are several movements in place to limit phone book distribution (Read about one such movement here). If potential clients aren’t looking in the phone books, they’re looking you up online– on their smart phones, Blackberries, and on their laptops.
- Instill confidence in your brand by posting testimonials, images, audio or video of your work or products.
- Reach a larger audience. Particularly if your business sells a specialty product or service, a website will help you reach more potential customers than a local advertisement would.
- Meet the demands of clients and customers who expect to be able to learn more about you.
- Protect your domain name. It is a business to buy and sell the domain names of existing businesses, or just “good domain names”. At the least, buying a domain name protects your brand for the future.
- Obtain more information about your clients and customers in order to better serve them, by tracking which pages on your site are visited most frequently.
- Use a website as an interactive tool. If you offer a service, a website form might be a great way to invite a potential client to show interest in your service. Set up polls to learn about customers’ preferences, or create mailing lists to inform users of new products and services. Place a Google Map on your site to show exactly where you are located and give directions.
- Look more professional. Send e-mail from [your name]@[your business].com rather than a personal e-mail account.