Why you need a web site?
   
Even if your business is small and sells products or services, and you don't think can be sold online? If you have a business, you should have a Web site. Period. No question. Without a doubt.

Here are few of the reasons.

    Internet marketing research firms predict that the number of online consumers will grow at a rate of 30 to 50 percent over the next few years. These numbers alone should be enough to persuade you that your business should have a Web site.

    Nowadays, there is very little that can't be sold over the Internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

    The web can almost completely remove the burden of repetitive questions on the phone. Allowing your staff to focus on the tasks at hand.

    Mistakes made by humans inevitably come back in the form of complaints, redo's, free shipping, late orders, lost customers and lost time chasing down the errors. These factors slow down the rate at which you can make money. Once complete, and thoroughly checked for problems, your online orders are guaranteed error free.

    How many of your sales team talk more than they listen? The web mostly listens and when it talks, it talks to the customer about what they chose. As a sales tool, you can talk to your customer about what they want to hear by allowing them to make choices about what they want to see.
The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the Web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

That said, it's not enough that you just have a Web site. You must have a professional-looking Web site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at store, your Web site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your Web site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

Even if yours is a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a Web site, size does not matter. It doesn't matter whether you are a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don't have a Web site, you are losing business to other companies that do.

Here's the exception to rule: It's actually better to have no Web site at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your Web site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful Web site for our customers!" or it screams, "Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!"