Since the advent of web (world wide web), in the year 1990, only 3000 websites were available, till year 1999, number just touched to 1 million, and since year 2000 till date, the number almost touched to 1 billion. A survey conducted by Netcraft, the websites till Jan 2015, was 875 million.

Now a days there is hardly any business which cannot be online. Different case studies and online analytics, state that businesses who have started new websites, they have seen a steep rise of 30-60% sales growth of the company. More than 75% of the buyers across the world check for the website online, and then decide about having a business. It means a website is synonymous with the business.

A very interesting question, I came across, during the discussion is “Why do I need a website, when I don’t have anything to sell online?”. There is a wrong notion about a website, that something is on sale. Business may it be B2B or B2C, website is a face of company to consumers (potential or existing), investors and employees. Business purpose can be corporate, e-commerce, business, informative, etc, but the actual purpose of the website is to carry identity of the company. There are some absolute essentials about a basic business website which can be noted down as further

Now when it was agreed to have a basic website for the business, my friend was not sure about the next steps. Few tips for website development

• Choose an agency and define the concept
• Ask for the website design prototype.
• Provide relevant contents, this is essential. (Keyword research may help to add few more, but having more is not bad at all)
• Showcase brand more than the product.
• Preferably in case of B2C, have reviews and feedback mechanism easily accessible. Lack of it will add doubts in the customer’s mind.
• Don’t compromise for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), this will make business more visible to potential customers.
• For B2B, product documentation, contact details are important. Ignoring will add business overhead in return.

Before developing a website, if you are maintaining the website, then propose to build it using CMS (Content Management System) tools like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. This option is easy, quick and cost effective.

Once decided about website, if the website is service based which involves more customer centric services, then it is advisable to have a mobile application with same name as that of business. Remember client engagement is more important than just a service.

How do we measure the return on investment for a our website, that’s the question everbody would raise, and it has very affirmative answer. Before 2005, there were very few players who used to provide tools for Branding, Marketing product and achieve so called impression count. Now due to popularity of Facebook, post 2007, and thanks to technology investment of various VCs, there are various ways, we can achieve our ROI. I will just touch base on few of them.

Till this point, I was able to successfully convince my friend. Are you convinced or not?

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