Do you need a website?

Imagine a man comes to your door and says he can reduce your heating bills by 50% a year. Great you say, how much does it cost? The man says, its  'only' £20,000. Would you buy? Of course not. However if a web design agency approaches your business and promises to increase the number of enquiries by 50% for a mere £20,000, would you buy then?

Often web design agencies are approached by businesses, and sometimes individuals, asking for a quotes for a website. What often happens is that the agency goes through the process of generating the technical requirements for the job, establishing what type of website is appropriate, and working out how many hours of engineering, design time, SEO and marketing will be needed to fulfil the client's wishes. The agency never asks the potential client whether they actually need to spend money on making a website in the first place. This obvious question is seldom asked but with the current range of free services that businesses can take advantage of, there is no longer such a clear benefit to paying for your own website. Below are some of the service that meet business requirements which do not require a website:

1. Customer focussed marketing - Facebook and myspace are really good places to connect with customers, you can use these systems to build up networks and disseminate information to subscribers without the need for expensive and lower value email marketing. Many websites have 'subscribe to our mailing list' boxes on the front page to enter your email address, but few fewer have 'join our network' facilities so that people can quickly get updates via facebook, myspace or twitter - although there is a trend for more twitter subscriptions, this is still quite small in the overall scheme of things.
    
2. local business information - You dont need to have a website with a location map on it to give directions to people on how to find you. Google business maps, Bing/MSN maps, multimap and other mapping services are far more powerful than a gif map on a web page with generic directions from the nearest motorway, and with google and bing maps, you also get listed in the local search results, thus ticking the online marketing box too. Opening hours, services list, online videos and discount vouchers can also be listed in google maps - all for free.
    
3. Ecommerce - As mentioned in a previous posting on this website, ecommerce sites can be quite expensive to build, host and maintain, however there are alternatives that do not cost the earth and do not require your own website. Examples of this are Ebay, Amazon, Google commerce and craiglist. With all of these options, your products are available to millions of people without spending anywhere near the amount of money required for a full ecom site, and if you set up a paypal account, you don't even have to have a merchant bank account, you can just use paypal to filter the money into a standard bank account.
    
4. Blog/articles - If you regularly submit news or opinions, then blogging and articles are for you. There is no need to have a website when there are excellent resources out there that are available for free. Blogger.com, google's own blog engine is fully featured and even has a google adsense option so you can actually make money from adwords displayed on your blog. For articles, there are many sites like articlebase.com that allows you to post your content online without the need for a website.
    
5. Job vacancies - there are many services that offer job vacancies - eg fish4jobs, monster.co.uk, totaljobs and about a million other online employment agencies.

These areas are just some of the reasons people use to justify having their own website. Sure there is the brand protection aspect of having your own domain name, but you can register your domain name without having a website (you can forward it to your blog or ebay store), and there is sometimes the need to do things on websites that you can't do via external services, but for most SMB's there are many options that you can use instead of getting your own website.

The problem is that usually, the client gets the impression that having a website is the most important thing in the modern information age, and that not having one puts you at a disadvantage, so when that men comes offering to increase enquiries by 50% you are instantly interested.

What I always suggest is that if the cost of having a website is greater than the relative benefits (which sometimes are difficult to calculate) then it is a bad idea to have one, and you would be better off using the multitude of free alernatives. If, however, there are compelling reasons to have your own web presence, then make sure you do your research before approaching any web design agency and have a clear idea of what is and what is not financially sensible to include in the website.