For many small businesses the idea of having a website can be a daunting one. Many of the questions raised are:

• What benefit will a website bring?

• Won’t it be expensive?

• I don’t know a lot about computers so how will I manage it?

These are all very valid questions as many small businesses have not yet looked at the possibilities of a website and some tend to think that it really isn’t for them.

The benefits it can bring to a small business, whether you are a sole trader or employ a small work force can be impressive. It gives you another avenue in which to advertise your services or products, for instance, if you are a builder you can use the website to showcase your services. This is especially important as you cannot advertise all of these in a newspaper and you can also provide photos and videos within the site of previous work so that potential customers can see the standard with which you work.

A website can be built to suit most budgets, no matter how small. The way prices work for website designs is dependant on what you require. For instance if you require a website with moving flash objects, lots of contact forms, a search facility, shopping cart, merchant services etc and multiple pages, then your costs will be high due to the extent of the work and the hours involved in building that site. However if you just require a basic website with a few pages then it really isn’t expensive, you can usually get one designed for about £250. Once that website is built it is yours but the only thing to factor in is the cost of hosting the site per year.

If your knowledge of computers is limited please do not be put off, a good website design company can offer many things, one of them being a CMS system (content management system). If your website would require regular updating of content and images a CMS would allow you to log into the site and make those changes yourself. Your website designer can train you on how to use this system, this would add slightly to the cost but well worth it. Your site maybe one that doesn’t need changing once it is set up so that would be a static site. This means that once it has been completed you will not have to do anything but if you require changes then only a website designer can do this, charged at an hourly rate.

It is important to understand the factors involved in owning a website. No matter how small your business is potential customers will use the internet as a way of finding your services either locally or nationally. That means that without a website your competitors who have one will get all of those potential customers.

Rather than thinking that you cannot afford a website, you should be asking yourself can I afford not to have one.