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How Would You Stuff Ten Elephants into a Small Website?
To get the answer, I need to share this little story with you. I have three friends that decided it’s time for them to buy a car. So the first one went out there and bought that tiny cute boogie car that you can barely get into but probably saves you gas money. The second one thought he might use one of those powerful and tall trucks that make you feel like there is a sky scraper next to you when it stops beside your car at the traffic light. My third friend bought a decent “normal” car, four doors, good mileage, the type that you can see all over the streets nowadays.
The interesting part of the story is this: my first friend has six children, he is “horizontally challenged” and so is his wife. You should see the show they are putting every time they try to decide whose turn is to use the boogie car. My second friend has no family and is what I can call “a thin man”, very slim, and he had just lost his job when he bought that truck. The third friend… well, not too much to tell about him: decent married guy, two kids, decent salary.
Now, the reason I’m sharing this little story with you is this: try to imagine these friends of mine are your businesses. Some of your businesses are big, with a lot of information to handle. Other businesses might be small, a startup or just a regular “family business” with not too many things going on. The majority of businesses out there in this area are what I would call “normal”, those “SME’s” the Government loves to talk about.
The cars in my story are the internet websites those businesses paid to have. I hope it’s obvious from this little story that you need to have the appropriate website for your business. Don’t save too much money and launch your business in the virtual world on a tiny little website that does not offer even the minimum of information your customers need to get about you. Do not also throw your money out of the window paying too much for a website built on a powerful but expensive database platform, with lots of features that you might never use. Just find the best balance between the real needs of your business and the size and complexity of your website. There might be also other things for you to consider: would you want to develop your website in the future? Do you want to use a database to handle products or customers details? Do you have to offer information on a lot of products and need to post technical details about them? Do you need to let people subscribe to something on your website or post something for their own?
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then you need to build your website on a modular system and the solution is a good and affordable content management system with a web programming language and a database. This would allow you to add things to your website at a later time with much ease, integrate useful modules that solves many aspects of your online business needs and most of all, it makes easy to manage the content.
In the end, just a word of caution: before you pay the bill for your website, please check if it’s professionally built. If you need to find out what makes a good site just read my future articles as I’ll try to share some of this knowledge with you. You don’t want to build a whole website in Word as I’ve recently seen a company doing for their clients. I don’t have anything against using word to build a couple of web pages, but I would definitely not trust it to hold my business… Oh, and the answer to the question in the title of this article is: you can’t!
Antonel Neculai
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