What are a website's advantages?

Development and distribution costs are extremely low. When you compare the cost of establishing a website to what it costs to promote your business in print or on the air, you'll see that a website is the cheapest form of marketing ever created. A website has virtually limitless space. You could put up a website with dozens of photographs and several thousand words for under $3,000 for the first year, and keep it up and running for a few hundred dollars per year after that. What would it cost to run a newspaper ad of this size for a year? Imagine how much it would cost to produce a catalog for 200 different products and keep it in consumers' hands for an entire year. You can accomplish this with a website very easily with low development cost and almost no distribution cost.

A website is globally accessible; that means your website can be viewed by anyone, anywhere, as long as they have Internet access. There are no physical limitations to broadcast areas, as in radio nor circulation region restrictions, as in newspapers or magazines.

You can keep your website more current more affordably than other media. You can update a website immediately and as often as you like. Imagine you sell products whose prices fluctuate. With a website, you can change these prices every time they go up or down, so your marketing materials are always accurate.

Small businesses can compete with large businesses since a website is economical and not limited by size. This means a small business can present as large or creative an image on the Internet as a bigger company — with the right design team.

A website also allows easy, safe communication between you and the consumer so that anyone who visits your site can contact you at any time by sending an email or filling out an online form. You can respond to all your customer inquiries at the same time, and do it when you have a free moment — not in the middle of rush hour when someone calls up to ask for product information or directions to your location.

A website can save you money on tech support and answering questions. If your employees spend a lot of time answering the same questions and sending out the same material, you can reduce that labor cost significantly by providing the information on the website. Your website can also take orders as people can place orders on a website at any time, day or night.

Every second of every day, your website is working for you!

As to your choice for website design, if a designer can't tell you why a website is a unique marketing tool as we have here, how successful will their website be? Are they helping you to develop a marketing mechanism or are they selling special effects? Is it an intelligent tool for driving business or an overpriced, turbo-charged business card? Make sure you choose a designer with marketing expertise, experience and skills