As a business owner, especially if you are just starting out, you might think you can’t afford a professional website. In reality, you can’t afford NOT to have one. The initial investment to set up a professional website is quickly offset by the increased traffic and business it generates. While there are services to maintain your website and help you market digitally, a professionally created website can easily be updated and managed by you or anyone in your organization after a simple how-to from your friendly neighborhood web designer. Hiring a professional to build your website saves you time in the short term, allowing you to get up a running in days or weeks instead of months, and money in the long term through increased traffic. When you consider how many people you can reach online, a well designed website is a very cost effective method of promoting your business compared to promotional events and traditional advertising.

Your website is like an online brochure or bulletin that can be updated in real time. It is much faster and easier to keep customers informed about your products and services via your website than print marketing materials

With a website, you can make announcements about new services and products, upcoming events, and special promotions. You can also post tips, resources, and other useful information to your blog to raise your site’s online visibility. Your website is the best place to provide customers with up to date information and news – and if you accidentally make a mistake while publishing it’s an easy fix.

Your website is accessible from anywhere in the world, enabling you to target a much wider audience. An eCommerce store allows you to unlock a vast market beyond the capabilities of any physical storefront. And operating 24 hours a day allows you to engage customers in vastly different time zones or on wildly different schedules. Language barriers are transcended through simple online translators, relieving you of the burden of translating your content yourself. Even if you are a service-based business, a website enables you to get found by people searching for your services in your area. Learn about our SEO services >

A website is the best place to showcase your work and demonstrate your expertise no matter what line of work you’re in. You can include a portfolio, gallery, videos, and testimonials from satisfied clients and highlight all the things that set you apart from your competition.

Maybe you’re already using your social media channels to showcase your work. But is your entire target audience already connected with you on social media? Social media platforms like Facebook control who sees your posts and how people interact with them. With your own website, your work can be viewed by anyone and you are in control of your brand, what you choose to share, and how people can engage with your content.

If you already have a D.I.Y. website, does it reflect your desired brand “image”? How does it look compared to your competitors ranking on page #1 on Google? If you want people to take you seriously and truly grow your business, it starts with a polished, professional image and online presence. Have you seen an increase in traffic to your self-made site over time? Professional websites drive traffic to your site through well executed back end design and optimized SEO. While your “free” site costs you nothing upfront, it costs you significant business over time. Professional websites offer the best ROI by optimizing your site for search engines and driving traffic to you and your business.

Professionally executed websites communicate information to your customers quickly and efficiently, saving you from spending time communicating the same things over and over again to different prospects that walk into your storefront. One client’s self-made site went from averaging 200-300 unique visitors per month to well over 5,000 after we re-built their site and started doing their SEO. Answering customer services emails became so time consuming and overwhelming, they struggled to keep up with the other aspects of day-to-day operations. We compiled a comprehensive FAQ page and strategically placed it before the contact link, so visitors could reference it before submitting their questions. Almost instantly, incoming emails asking the same repeated questions reduced by 75%. As a result, the client was able to focus on other things to grow their business and has since doubled their sales in the past year.

A website enables you to improve service to your customers and clients and keep them coming back. You can share tips and advice on how to get the most from your products or services and demonstrate how it solves their problems

If you offer a service, such as lawn care you can post valuable advice to help people maintain their garden, or how often to aerate your lawn. Or if you have a business that offers virtual personal training and consulting, you could give advice on how to workout from home without weights or different stretches to relieve back pain. By including a comprehensive frequently asked questions (FAQ) page, you can regularly add content to answer all your customers’ questions.

Even if you’re already posting your content on social media, a website allows you to actually own your online space on your own domain and gives you full control over what resides there. While social media is a great way to promote your business and share content from your website, the algorithms that run these platforms control who will see your content and how often. Endlessly long and complicated terms of service agreements give full control to social media platforms over any and all content added to them. They can delete your accounts without warning, costing you years of photos, marketing content, and customer reviews. Ceding control of your business to the whims of a social media algorithm is needlessly risky.

Similar risks underlie freebie websites. If you decide to take your business elsewhere, you can’t always take your website content with you and you might be stuck having to start all over from scratch. With your own self-hosted website,you own everything contained within your online space. If you ever had to move to a different hosting service provider, you can make a backup of your site and migrate over to the new host. It’s simple and safe. Self-hosted websites offer greater safety and control than so-called free websites and social media pages. Why risk the future of your business? Protect your future with your own site.