Posted: Jul 05, 2008
I came across a series of interesting articles from major media publications demonstrating that small businesses with websites are not experiencing the same economic fallout that other more traditional “offline” businesses seem to be. If you’ve been considering investing in a website but still unsure if it would help or hurt you, I recommend you look this over.
When we use the term “offline” business, we are referring to those businesses that do not make money online. But as these articles demonstrate, the owners of these businesses have certainly not left their web presence to chance.
U.S. News and World Report has an excellent article entitled Online Retailing Offers a Bright Spot which was just published April 28, 2008. In other words, this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky report written before gas was $4/gallon. Oddly, U.S. News and World Report are having financial difficulties themselves (as is the entire magazine business) and have just switched to bi-weekly publication to cut costs.
Cheryl Miller dispels a few “excuses” that some businesses offer when avoiding the small investment of going online. Her short article, Bringing Offline Business Online is a solid read. Going over some of these same concerns with a practiced web designer or developer can be an excellent way to sort out your thoughts on the matter.
Business Week magazine has a quality series of articles from past issues for small to medium-sized business owners who need to find out more about having a website. I’ve read over a number of them, and I have very little disagreement with their information. If you run a small business, you can’t help but benefit from spending an hour going over these articles. You will have a much more insightful conversation with your web developer that will help you to explore the full value of a website (or website update) so that you know the best questions to ask. These articles are about business on the web – not about code – so they are very accessible.
If you are short on time (uh, which you shouldn’t be when it comes to improving and excelling your own business), I’ll point out a few to start with that I thought were particularly helpful:
