The path you choose for your company or organization’s web site can have serious benefits or consequences. Below are some qualifications to point you in the right direction…
Question 1: Informational web site or E-commerce (shopping cart) web site?
This is the first question you should ask yourself when building a new web site. E-commerce web sites require databases, credit card processing, freight calculations, coupon codes and other functionality that almost never come along side “informational” web site structures & templates. Frequently, web developers can’t even support E-commerce or Shopping Cart development. This can be a problem down the road in that you may have to re-do your web site in order to upgrade.
You should make E-commerce part of your web development conversation if:
- You have products that you’re trying to promote, and if things go well you might try to sell them online.
- Your reason for existing is products, even if you don’t think you’re going to sell them online. (ie. manufacturing, wholesale, B2B)*
- Your web site is all about products and it will need to be maintained frequently.
*Having your products in an organized database on your web site has advantages, even if you’re not going to take orders online. The biggest advantage is good search engine rankings. This is especially the case if you have a lot of products. (a lot of products in a database means a lot of pages on your site. It seems the search engines like large sites)
Question 2: Custom web site or template web site?
In this shaky economy this question is also a good one to ask yourself. Chances are you have seen some good lookin’ web sites out there. We all have. Chances are better that those good lookin’ web sites were expensive. The best way to present this argument is to think about cars. Many of us have seen fancy luxury or sport cars zooming around us. Many of us have realized that owning these cars is not possible or just not practical. Web sites work the same way. Developing a fully custom web site is the equivalent of a car manufacturer hand-building or offering a very specialized vehicle. Like these high-end cars, custom web sites are both expensive to build and expensive to maintain! The reason web site templates exist is because web developers have found “best practices” in web development that they would recommend to “most” clients. You can compare template web design to the assembly line of the auto industry.
Benefits to template designs:
-Fast to launch (the web site is practically built already!)
-Less expensive (templates require less of everyone’s time and are always cheaper than custom)
-Easier to change (designers/programmers are familiar with the web site layout and work faster)
-More functionality for your buck (developers can include more goodies because they spend less time on design/programming)
Benefits to custom designs:
- Your web site will look at least a little bit different then every other web site you’ve seen
- Built to order (although it will cost much more, the developer will only include functionality you request)
