WS - Why Do Many Real World Businesses Not Have a Web Site?

Many small to medium size businesses do not have web sites because:

1. The concept of designing, creating, hosting and publishing a website can be a very daunting task. There are many conflicting methodologies and strategies that when initially investigated by the would be keen business owner, confuse and create a stalemate situation where no progress is made and eventually the project withers and dies.

2. Even if the business owner decides on a 'do it yourself' strategy some technical issues might arise that push the project onto the hard shoulder - and again 'business as usual' takes priority and the web site ends up forgotten and unpublished.

3. Having decided on an outsourcing strategy - the prohibitive costs of some web site designers/publishers would mean that the project just would not get out of the starting blocks.

4. Even if the owner struggled with an early web-site, it was such a struggle & such a steep learning curve - that the attitude "if it isn't broke don't fix it" pervades - and the web site stands as an icon of bad design, poor performance and critically poor search engine rankings. This would definitely drive customers away.

Additionally there are many considerations to be taken into consideration when creating even an elementary simple web site for business promotion.

The aesthetics, how the site looks, first impressions are of vital importance. If it looks terrible potential customers will go to the competition.

The "web usability" of the site - how it drives is also very important - if the potential customer is frustrated, lost or confused they will click away.

The performance of the site, in terms of browser load times needs to not frustrate potential customers, or again you would have lost that person. This can be influenced by both design and hosting factors.

The 'copy' (words & to a certain extent images) on the site should be optimised to sell the product and/or service.

The site needs to be 'on-site' optimised for search engine ranking. This includes the correct use of keywords in titles and tags, correct file and image naming, xml site map. The list goes on.

Of course 'off-site' search engine optimisation also needs to be considered, but that is not within the scope of this article.

Yet to an experienced web designer/publisher a simple site that takes all the above into consideration can be created and published in a couple of hours.