Are websites a commodity
07/07/10 10:43
Once again I have met a company local to Sussex that offer websites with full content management for a very small monthly fee. Just £15.
I'm really starting to think of websites as so many packets of cornflakes on the shelves of the world wide web !
The last company I met were and still are marketing stater web sites for £2.99 a month again these are build it yourself content management systems.
Is this a good thing I wonder? With the commoditisation of anything comes a cost that is maybe unseen by many,. take corn flakes as an example. Kellog's owned the market at one point, they created a brand and a product that was the best and maybe the first of it's king in the world and so held the unique position. Not so now with store brands coming into play and driving the cost down over time with a relative effect on quality.
I know that if you take the price of the product out of the equation most people will prefer to buy the top brand items because the quality is usually far better than other brands available. But it's price that makes us choose to buy the sometimes inferior product especially in these times of recession and cutbacks when we all need to save a little on our spending.
I think this is true of websites too as they become a commodity. It's pretty easy to find a simple design template that'll work with Wordpress, Joomla or any of the other popular CMS systems but do they really fit the need of your business?
Oh sure you can get used to eating somewhat less tasty cornflakes and having a website that does not quite hit the mark for your business, after all, nothing is perfect is it?
The unseen effect of commoditised websites on your business could affect your income from on line sales and enquiries by as much as 68%. It's not so much the design that of your site that will affect your business it's the overall usability and linkage to your overall business processes that will really hurt your business.
So how do you as a business owner avoid your online presence becoming commodity product? Well you can still use one of the free or very low cost CMS platforms to enable you to edit and update your website content and in some cases these will really help your visibility on the web but do make sure that you've considered your business process in relation to your website visitor experience (user experience) and make sure that the design fits with the best of usability guidelines.
For more information on getting a website that really works for you and your online business and to find out how you can make your website more visible on the search engines drop an email to "SEO Steve"
I'm really starting to think of websites as so many packets of cornflakes on the shelves of the world wide web !
The last company I met were and still are marketing stater web sites for £2.99 a month again these are build it yourself content management systems.
Is this a good thing I wonder? With the commoditisation of anything comes a cost that is maybe unseen by many,. take corn flakes as an example. Kellog's owned the market at one point, they created a brand and a product that was the best and maybe the first of it's king in the world and so held the unique position. Not so now with store brands coming into play and driving the cost down over time with a relative effect on quality.
I know that if you take the price of the product out of the equation most people will prefer to buy the top brand items because the quality is usually far better than other brands available. But it's price that makes us choose to buy the sometimes inferior product especially in these times of recession and cutbacks when we all need to save a little on our spending.
I think this is true of websites too as they become a commodity. It's pretty easy to find a simple design template that'll work with Wordpress, Joomla or any of the other popular CMS systems but do they really fit the need of your business?
Oh sure you can get used to eating somewhat less tasty cornflakes and having a website that does not quite hit the mark for your business, after all, nothing is perfect is it?
The unseen effect of commoditised websites on your business could affect your income from on line sales and enquiries by as much as 68%. It's not so much the design that of your site that will affect your business it's the overall usability and linkage to your overall business processes that will really hurt your business.
So how do you as a business owner avoid your online presence becoming commodity product? Well you can still use one of the free or very low cost CMS platforms to enable you to edit and update your website content and in some cases these will really help your visibility on the web but do make sure that you've considered your business process in relation to your website visitor experience (user experience) and make sure that the design fits with the best of usability guidelines.
For more information on getting a website that really works for you and your online business and to find out how you can make your website more visible on the search engines drop an email to "SEO Steve"
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