A website is your marketing vehicle. A business has to reach out to their target market somehow. Without customers, a business is dead in the water. Advertising has always been the market source for businesses to reach their clients, and advertising will continue to be the way. What has changed though, is the type of advertising that will bring better results.

Unfortunately, for the companies that specialize in print advertising, that gravy train is on its way back to the station. Due to long hours at the office and places to visit like Myspace and Facebook, people are spending much more time on-line and basically live most of their lives there. This is no big secret, ask anyone how much time they spend on-line… the results you will get will shock you!

In today’s world, you will need a strong web presence. The value of a website is priceless if you think of how it could return on the investment if done professionally.

Having someone other than a skilled programmer working on the back end (the coding part), and a well versed graphic artist designing the front end will not bring as good returns. A professionally built website is usually done by a team of people, each highly specialized in their area of expertise. Having only one person doing it all for you will leave you behind the more aggressive businesses.

Websites have been around for many years. The sites that have been up for 10 or more years now have the authority to maintain the search engines higher positions, but outdated websites can be easily pushed to lower positions if better websites are presented to the search engine. Unlike print, new websites go live every minute of each day! If you are not interested in a strong web presence for your business starting today, prepare for the worst.

Your website is an important part of your business, make sure you treat it as such.

It’s actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad or even less attractive than your competition.

Your site speaks volumes about your business. It either says: “Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful site for our customers!”

or it screams:

“Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!”