How your website can attract traffic and drive sales.

Having a simple contact page may get you to page ten on Google if you are lucky but it is unlikely to bring in much work. However, with some thought, your website can drive your business forward and dramatically increase turnover and profit.

Let’s start with looking at the different types of websites which are available. The most common are

· Brochure sites,
· Content management sites and
· E-commerce sites.

In practice, you will probably finish up with a website that is a combination of different types but it helps if you are aware of the options.

Brochure site
The simplest form of web site is a brochure site. This originally evolved as an online copy of existing company brochures and is designed to be fairly static. Typically brochure sites will have three to five pages containing information about the company and its products. Because of their simplicity, brochure sites are the cheapest, costing from around £300 - £500+ for a couple of pages. Brochure sites should contain some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but this will be fairly basic. Because brochure sites tend to be static, the web crawlers don’t rate them very highly and you are unlikely to reach top spot with a simple brochure site. However, they are invaluable for providing information to customers and establishing a presence and should not be dismissed by those businesses with a low budget.

Content Management site
Content Management web sites are for those who want a living, changing website to match their business. In the simplest form this means that you can add blogs or articles, provide information about special offers or show today’s menu. More complex content management sites will allow you to add chat rooms or link in with e-commerce modules. With the content on these sites changing regularly you can really work on SEO and the web crawlers are more likely to move your site towards top spot. The cost of content management sites varies according to content but you should expect prices to start around the £600 - £800+ mark. Bespoke features will add to the cost.

e-commerce site
E-commerce sites are content management sites which allow you to sell your products via your site. An e-commerce site will enable you to take orders and collect payments via credit card and PayPal. You will be able to upload product pictures, descriptions and prices. Some systems will also link directly to your stock control programme and show volumes on the site. You can even link directly through to a despatch department. E-commerce sites can effectively take over your entire sales process. Because they link into your sales and accounts processes they are more complex than other sites. You should expect to pay at least £1,200+ for the most basic e-commerce site.

Search engine optimisation
Whatever site you decide your business needs, it is important that you pay attention to the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or your site will languish well down the lists and won’t generate the sales that you deserve. We will be giving you further guidance on SEO but there are a few basic techniques which will help. Firstly, make sure that you include lots of key words in your text. Think about what people might search for when looking for your product and include those words or phrases. Secondly, changing sites rank higher than static ones so a weekly blog will help. Thirdly, creating back links your will also help to improve rankings so for example a hotel might advertise on a tourist board website with links back to the hotel’s own site. These back links need to be relevant as web crawlers will dismiss those that aren’t.

wefinda can help you get up to three quotes for all your business website needs. Just ask one of our trained customer service team when you contact us.