Your website is the first point of contact between you and your customers. Your website tells a story about your business and who you are. In most cases it plays a decisive role in choosing you over your competition. A website with unique design, easy user interface, valuable contents, engaging platform, striking features, testimonials and illustrations will help to leverage your products & services.
There are 5 decisive factors you must consider before building a website.
Is your website build on Open Source CMS or Proprietary CMS?
CMS stands for Content Management System. CMS is a platform that enables you to create, modify and change websites without the technical expertise and background.
Open source CMS like WordPress is a game changer and gives you a freedom from long-term contracts. You own all the codes and files related to your website. It provides utmost flexibility to edit and modify your website 24/7 without having to wait to hear from your vendors. With open source CMS your options are unlimited in terms of managing your website.
With proprietary CMS you are locked into the vendors’ system. You pay monthly fees to run your website in their system. Since you have agreed to use their existing system, adding new features and plugins is nearly impossible. If you are not happy with your vendor and wants to change your system it can be a very daunting task.
WordPress has a huge support groups that is rapidly evolving. New features and plugins are constantly added and available for your website. 75 million sites use WordPress and it is the number one CMS platform available today.
Is your website going to be fully responsive on all device sizes?
Fully responsive website responds to all devices despite their varying screen sizes. Users should be able to open and browse your website on mobile phones, ipads, laptops and desktop computers.
The trends of browsing websites on the big screen is slowly shifting towards portable gadgets like smart phones and tablets. The popularity of these devices has created an urgency to adapt to these changes.
In the past, it was a matter of choice but now
How much it cost to build a website?
Your industry determines the level and standard of your website. Your business needs define its price. As a business owner/manager your goal is to find the most cost effective way to address these requirements and own a highly productive website.
Hiring a web developer and finding a right one is as important as hiring an employee. A wrong decision will cost you time and money. In order to avoid this hurdle most of the businesses choose proprietary CMS and get locked into the vendor’s system.
Does it sounds like a Catch 22?
Low initial setup fee are mostly accompanied by a long term contracts. Even after your contract expires you will not have access to your code and files. You will have no choice but to renew your contract again. Your contract will bound you to the quality of service you’ll receive from your vendors. You will have limited authority over your website.
If you hire a good web developer, you will pay a large sum of money in exchange for their service. Even though it will enable you to choose Open source CMS, own all the codes and files and save a lot of time & money in the long run….. the process is still expensive.
Do you want to spend a good portion of your marketing budget to build a website?
If your answer is NO, CustomizePress is happy to provide you with the affordable solutions. We are here to break a myth that launching website costs lot of money. Talk to one of our representative and we will find the best affordable solution for your business or click here to choose from our existing packages.
Do you receive enough training and support to effortlessly run your website?
Building a website is an ongoing process. Adding contents and features to get most out of the ever changing technology is crucial to efficiently run your business.
Whether you choose Open source CMS platform or proprietary source CMS, you will require training and support to get the full benefit of your new website. The more comfortable you are with your platform, the more competently you can use it for your growth.
Be cautious because not all the companies and developers offer this services. Failure to ask this question will leave you with a brand new website without the proper knowledge of editing it. You will have to spend additional time and money training yourself and getting familiar with the platform.
Do they provide integration to analytics, statistics and social media platforms?
Collecting and analyzing your website performance data plays a crucial role in your business success. Most companies use these datas to continuously improve their online presence and marketing strategies. Integrating such programs into your website helps to track important information such as,
- How many prospects visited your site?
- How many of them are repeated visitors?
- How long they are visiting your site (in hours and minutes)?
- How many of them leave your site from the first page (bounce rate)?
- Where are you getting your visitors from, google organic search, referrals, ads?
- Many many more…
The amount of information you can collect using these free applications is huge.
Google analytics is the most popular web analytics tool with large online support group. The best part is, it is FREE. It has all the features required to extract important information from the collected data. This will enable you to run both proactive as well as reactive marketing campaigns to get most out of your marketing budget.
Google Analytics uses asynchronous tracking code that can be placed into the <head></head> tags of your webpages. When someone visits your webpage, the code collects information about the visitors, sets cookies and sends it to google analytics. Once the data is processed, Google Analytics will check for your configuration settings and reports your data.
Connecting your website to your social media platforms promotes user interactions with your company. Your website will act as a central hub and provides easy access to all the social media platforms at a click of a button. A well designed and appealing social media icons will enable to share and like your posts and eventually expanding your online presence.
Integration is vital to expand your online presence.