Part 1: Your Online Presence: Your Website

We are delighted to do a series of guest posts for our financial planner—Carrera & Company. You can subscribe to her newsletters to see this series first.

Your company’s website can be the single most important communication piece for your business. This is often the first place people learn about your product and services. Your website serves the following purposes:

• It’s your business card
• It’s your catalog or portfolio
• It’s your biography
• It’s your literature distribution channel
• It’s your order form

Your website serves so many purposes that you need to make sure it is always current and correct. Online media is fast and easy to keep up to date, either by working with a web firm or making changes yourself via a content management system (CMS).

At the minimum your website should include:

• Homepage — tell people quickly why you and why your company with a combination of images and text.
• About Us page — who is behind your company?
• Contact Us page — how can people easily call you, email you, send a fax or send a piece of mail?

Beyond that, each website is different in focus—are you providing resources for current clients? Are you engaging prospective clients? What else does your website need to do for you?

When engaging a consulting firm or freelancer to work on your website you can expect the following process:

1. Meeting to discuss the business goals of your website.
2. Review designs and select an overall look for your site.
3. Website coding and content creation.
4. Website launch.

Websites take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to build. You can expect to pay between $5,000 and $60,000+ for your website, depending on the number of pages, features included (CMS editing, e-Commerce, web applications, etc). When you look at all that your website will do for your business it’s important to realize that these costs will be recuperated in spades over the life span of your site.

After a Launch it’s important to keep an eye on website analytics (how do people find you? how long do they stay on your site? what do they look at?). Google Analytics is one of the best tools in the marketplace for insight—and it’s free.

As part of your website build and/or ongoing maintenance you should consider search engine optimization (SEO). Next month we’ll take a look at SEO and how it can work for your company.

For questions, comments, or to work with us to create or improve your website please contact Sawaya Consulting. SAWAYA Consulting is a strategic business-to-business partner focusing on information management through design & technology. We build corporate tools, informational websites, and web applications. We are located in Salt Lake City, Utah and online at www.sawayaconsulting.com.