In this age of austerity cuts many small and medium business owners are looking to save money.  This means every cost line must come under scrutiny to see if it provide value for money and if it can be done cheaper.

One of these cost items will be the expenses that relate to the web site (web hosting, design / build of web site and ongoing maintenance).  Lets take a moment to think about each of these areas.

Web Hosting

Not unless you are a large business who has made the necessary investment to host your web site on your own infrastructure, most businesses will be purchasing their service from a web hosting company.

This is a sensible choice for most businesses as this can be viewed as a commodity service with many reliable providers.  Competition is strong meaning that pricing is very competitive.

The alternative is to invest heavily in technology infrastructure, employ technical resources and then be prepared to continually update to keep up to speed with market trends.

Recommendation

Outsource the service by buying from a reliable web hosting business.   However, make sure that you shop around for the best deal.  This is not necessarily price, look what features are included and the cost of moving to the next package up.  You may find providers offering great headline prices but with limited web storage, e-mails, bandwidth, no databases, etc.  Then the cost to move to the next package up is a significant increase in price.  Always remember there is nothing that really is FREE!

Web Design / Build

A number of business owners are very computer savvy.  They are comfortable using new software packages, online social media, etc.  Therefore, it would be a logical choice to take on the design and build of their business web site.

This can prove to be very effective.  However, there are some considerations that often get overlooked:

How much time is it going to take to design, build and publish your web site?

I don’t know about you but, if I had a leaking tap, I could read a dummies guide to plumbing, get my tool box out and then go on to fix the leak.  This is great but what is the cost?  I don’t necessarily mean the £ cost, I mean the cost in my time.

It is fair to say that it will take me considerably longer than a qualified plumber.  This means the valuable, scarce commodity of time will be diverted away from important things like my family or building my business.  As time is far more important I would phone a professional and pay the plumber happily for the job.

Have I done a good job?

While you may be able to put together a good web site and publish it to the web, is it a good job?

• Has it been designed to meet your business objectives?
• Has it been developed in a way that it can grow with your business?
• Has it been optimised for key search phrases?

There are many other considerations.  However, the point is while the web site may be OK to start with, it may prove expensive and problematic to take it to the next level as you grow.  If it has not been designed to meet your objectives i.e. sales leads, then it won’t be effective at all!

Recommendation

Using the plumbing anology.  You make fix the leak but you may have made more serious damage to the pipes for the future!

Use a good web designer who can work with you, understand your requirements, provide advice and then execute the project quickly and efficiently on your behalf.

Web Site Maintenance

If you have a web site that needs regular updates to ensure it remains useful, you will need to be performing regular maintenance and updates.

Again there is no reason why you can not take on the work to update web pages, add articles, add new pages, etc.  However, again the question to ask is “what is the best use of your time?”.

Recommendation

Speak to your web designer and ask them to provide a quote for providing an ongoing update service.

I would like to close by saying that the idea for this article came from real experiences with some of the Colchester businesses I work with who recognise that their time is better spent on building their own business while letting Digital Ark concentrate on their web site.

Please visit our web site www.digitalark.co.uk for details of our web hosting, web design and web site maintenance plans or alternatively e-mail at simon@digitalark.co.uk.

Simon