Building Your Website
Things to consider when building your website for your sales funnel
The options on ways to build your website can definitely give one analysis paralysis.
From all the free gimmick builders, overpriced memberships, and if you can picture a crowd of our clients, & our team, give a collective eyeroll… shoppah(wha)?
The problem is, most people simply aren’t sure what they need and that always depends on what you’re trying to do.
What are your goals for this website?
Do you just want it to collect leads in a contact form, or mailing opt-in and possibly make the phone ring?
Then you may not need that much at all.
If your only goal is to add a bit of legitimacy to your local business, that you’re already promoting in the community, you might get away with your basic website builder kind of website.
We offer something a bit better-than-average in our SitePad website builder.
But then the next question always is…
How do you plan to send traffic to it?
Which means, were you planning on running pay-per-click campaigns to push traffic like a landing page?
Or…
Were you planning on your website scaling with your business needs?
Being around for the long haul?
Earning & building your brand an online reputation?
Gaining authority & rank on the search engine?
If you’re wanting, or expecting, top organic search rank then maybe a basic free website builder tool isn’t quite what you’re looking for.
They typically don’t offer any advanced SEO features baked in.
This means things like…
automatically ping to Google; to let the search engine know there’s new content to spider
an optimized, or efficient, blogging experience
And they hardly ever offer any addon functionality for when you think of more things that you want for your website.
Which leads us to a content management system like WordPress or Joomla… and there’s others…
Open Source content management systems allow your site to grow with your business needs.
They’re usually supported by a community of developers contributing extensions or plugins that add extra functionality to your website… shopping carts, booking & reservations, listings managers, without you being trapped into a rental solution.
So again, it’s about what you’re trying to do and what you want out of your website.
Are you planning on selling products?
If you have more than 1-5 products, you will probably outgrow the less professional platforms pretty fast.
Because let’s face it, at some point you’re going to want MORE from your website.
Things that most people assume are basic, or simple, probably won’t be built into the less professional website builders.
It could be as simple as variable products, but we have integrated all different types of requests into client shop websites.
- Role-Level Pricing (ie, Wholesale Accounts, Tiered Pricing)
- Bulk Pricing
- Bundled Products
- Custom Attributes
- Conditional Logic
- Various Shipment Tracking
- Dropshipping Platforms
Most gimmicky website builders have very limited functionality baked in.
Many of our clients are small business owners that had quickly outgrown these over-marketed solutions.
Don’t get me wrong, those solutions are excellent for people that don’t have a lot of money to invest in their business in the early days of growth.
Unfortunately, when you start out on the wrong platform, due to the lack of scalability, you will most likely be starting over from scratch.
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