In my business I spend a lot of time working with people who are starting new business ventures, and part of the work that I do is to help them come up with creative ideas for launching and running their new company. I recently worked with a girl who is creating a line of jewelry. She hopes to sell the jewelry by doing home parties. Her idea is to design a catalog and set up a few displays around town at craft shows and school functions in an effort to drum up business.
The jewelry is beautiful, and I believe that she has what it takes to set up a nice and possibly quite lucrative business. But when I asked her what products she had listed on her website and how she had the website set up for potential customers she told me that she was not going to utilize a website because she’s not very computer literate and therefore feels it would be more cost effective to focus only on jobs that she can do in person.
Please, readers, if you are selling a product that could have a national appeal, such as clothing or jewelry, do yourself a favor and set up a website.
Websites are crucial for businesses in today’s market. People are online a lot: think about it, even the newest phones have Internet access! We have limited attention spans, very little time and we want things now. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve popped on to Amazon to purchase a new book rather than run out to the library and get it for free. I don’t always have time to head out to various stores for things. Sometimes it is just much easier to order items online.
A variety of options exist for those needing a website. If you have the money, spend it on a great website that will include SEO writing, a design that is suited for your company, an easy to use shopping cart for the merchant and an easy way for you to get on, check email and change content if you need to do so. If you don’t have the money, purchase template and hire someone to tweak it to fit your needs. At the very least, do it yourself with an easy to use site builder, though you should always at least check the site in various browsers to make sure that it is suited not just for IE, the most popular, but for mozilla and netscape as well.