Is a website really necessary?

[brightncheerful]

Having noticed that my website now shows up as ‘not secure’ I am contemplating whether to bother with a website at all. In the short term, I have to get an SSL and that’s in hand. It’s the medium to long-term that I am thinking about.

(I am not a techie so “?” means if that’s the right word/terminology)

I have read the need (?) for https and the overt objective is all very noble. Assuming I understand correctly. the intention is for each site? to have a unique IP address, not shared.

As this is? a Google-oriented initiative and we know that Google makes its money from advertising and more particularly targeted advertising, I am wondering whether the intention is first to rid the www of all not -secure sites (a process made easier by encouraging visitors to treat not secure with suspicion and avoid) and then to concentrate upon extracting for advertising purposes as much saleable content from secure sites and IP end-owners.

Effectively, by pruning the www of what are categorised as ‘not secure’ sites, Google can carry on including all sites in its search engine whilst simultaneously deterring anyone from visiting them all.

Whether to have a website depends upon what you do. Generally, people regard a website as essential, a no-brainer. But I'm not so sure. I operate in the B to B market, providing a professional service in the commercial property market and the content on my site is information only. Before I had a website, I managed perfectly well to attract a vast amount of work simply by circulating my printed brochure and a printed regular newsletter. Since deciding to concentrate upon my website, which is now over 500 pages, I ceased a printed brochure and newsletter as well. Unlike my printed brochure and newsletter which was distributed to my target market - recipients readily found - the website attracts a different type of reader/enquirer because on-line I have no control over who visits. Since inception, the site has been listed amongst the top 5 searches so SEO is not an issue. But whether on balance I am better off for having the ‘connection’ aspect of my marketing done for me rather than doing it all myself the old-fashioned way is a moot point.

To my way of thinking, a non-transactional website is an online brochure having any number of pages. Prior to the web (for my use, that it), I used to change my brochure (a few pages at the most) regularly - probably the most successful was the opening line 'welcome to the right way of thinking' and all content right-hand justified.

With SSL and its requisite renewals via my ISP, not to mention the ISP’s hosting renewal costs, etc. it is apparent that the expense of a website is rising. So too is the loss of privacy from an operational perspective. With a unique IP address, a search engine is more? able to pin-point the IP addressee?

Having a website and the impression it forms and leaves is, in my view, only really necessary for attracting the first-time visitor. It is my task to convert a visitor into a paying customer, also my task to ensure that each paying customer comes back for more whenever in need of more advice. So arguably the really hard tasks are nothing to do with Google or the website developer/software or the site hosting company (all of whose costs and requirements need to be met without any certainly of response).

As I have said, it very much depends upon what you do and the role of the site, It used to cost me about £1000 ex VAT a year to print and distribute my quarterly newsletter, excluding the time-involved in packing, to approximately 2000 recipients. My measurable return on capital was usually 10 times total cost. Non-measurable is the value of repeat work and recommendation. Having a website has also made me lazy. The whereabout of my target market is readily identifiable. Whereas in the past I would contact direct someone I thought might be interested in my services, I now wait for people to contact me. Via my website, I don’t think I’ve attracted anything like the same calibre of client that my printed newsletter achieved. I don't think that's a content issue, more likely a website is not the first port of call for the calibre. Instead, because the information and advice that is freely available on the site is so useful, I receive a steady flow of enquiries all of which have to be processed even though four out of five enquiries are pointless from my point of view. (Amongst the information is possibly a unique service: a calculator for percentage changes in the Retail Price Index and applying the percentage to a rent. I had the feature designed to cater for an internal need of mine and thought others might find it useful too: others do, including lots of people who like asking daft questions!

It concerns me too that I am obliged to be more careful in what I write about on my site, lest I inadvertently offend a 'snowflake', as distinct from what my newsletter might've contain: i do not have a comments facility on the site but linking to websites is a feature of social media, unlike a printed newsletter that more likely limited to private consumption. I could password-protect part of the site but that doesn't address the overall issue. Of course, such factors are my style specific but there is I think no getting away from wondering whether to have a website is no longer necessarily such a good idea. Especially nowadays when the cost of circulating a printed newsletter could be reduced by email distribution.

I’d welcome your comments.
BnC

[supremetwo]

You may be able to get a free SSL certificate.

viewtopic.php?f=39&t=14186&p=173685&hilit=ssl#p173685

[Lanark]

An SSL certificate is not about 'securing' the content of your website, it still going to be readable by anyone on the internet.

What it secures is the privacy of your website visitors, the metadata i.e. who visited which page on which website on what date/time and from what IP address/location.

This may seem like it wouldnt be important but there are lots of non-intuitive connections people can make from such data.

for example if your website has details of farm machinery and a user goes to read it.
Their insurance company gets hold of that meta data and decides - "theres a chance this person does dangerous work involving farm machinery" and so raises the next renewal price.

That's probably a silly example but the point is that the only way to prevent third parties snooping is to just encrypt everything.
In fact using encryption on its own,may not be enough but it's a good first step.

Theres no connection between SSL and IP addresses, you can have multiple SSL websites all sharing the same IP address.

[johnhemming]

There are lots of different ways of doing things. It is entirely possible to get a free SSL certificate and relatively easy to get cheap hosting. On the other hand you can find people who will charge you a lot of money for essentially the same thing.

I do think, however, that it is best for a business to have a website, but to be careful about how much they spend on it and what the objective is.

Lets encrypt offer a good service, but it should be noted that you need to update the certificate about every 3 months. Because I run a number of domains with wildcard subdomains my team and I are writing automated code for updating certificates, but that is quite a difficult thing to do.

[JoyofBrex8889]

I think trying to market without a website is madness. A website is your shop window to the world and incredibly cheap for the exposure it can potentially offer.

You mentioned you were targeting c2000 clients with paper marketing newsletters. Why not start an email list and automate the mailshot to your regular targets with mail-chimp or similar service. Your clients may even appreciate not having the physical mailshot! You could even go a step further and harvest further email addresses from visitors to your website and send them your material, and generate some leads that way.

It seems that you are finding the leads from the website less good than those in real life. Of course they are: face to face contacts with old customers are always going to trump new leads tentatively reaching out for your help with their business. The challenge is to convert the new leads into those valuable repeat customers you have serviced for years.

I don’t know your business but it seems you have some good advantages: you have a service people seem to want, a pretty clear idea of who your customers are, and a website that is high in the search engine with track record of generating new leads, albeit there is a lot of chaff to sort from the wheat.

Perhaps describe who you are looking to respond to (ie your good customer) on the website immediately above your contact details. That may help filter some time wasters.

Re laziness: you should not cease pressing the flesh with your known targets. You are already giving yourself the task of writing 4 newsletter mailshot a year. But you should definitely ask whether stuffing 4000 envelopes and spending a £1000 pounds on postage and printing is a necessary task. Maybe you could spend the same time and effort on personally contacting the best past and prospective clients and adding them to your new email address list?

Good luck. Running a small business is full of dilemmas like these, how best to spend time and effort. Technology should be a boon not a burden to you as it lets you develop repeatable processes and automate away some of the costs and unproductive time used in marketing. So develop a process to identify the best website leads, ruthlessly delete all enquiries about your calculator that are not buyers of your service and use the time freed to get out among your biggest spending customers. Nothing beats a face to face relationship.

[didds]

I'd say that if you don't have a web presence in some way shape or form you can only but lose business to competitors that do - its that simple.

As to what that web presence is, however, is a wide ranging spectrum.

It could be a full bunga web site kept up to date constantly with new projects, ideas etc. And contact page.
It could be a very simple web site containing no more than a brief outline of what you offer and contact details.

Due to the approach of some web browsers now, you may find you'll need to a SSL certificate as the browsers will expect a https site. From a business perspective as a rule of thumb you wouldn't need a certificate for a simple site offering information - usually "only" when you are receiving information that the sender may not want being in open text eg logins, payments online etc.

Or your web presence could be something a simple as a Facebook BUSINESS page - with blurb regarding your services and contact details.You then point your domain and the www subdomain (as an example) to the FB business page. SSL certs already handled for you. And the reader doesn't need a FB accont to read a basic business page. Its what I do for my very low key self employed business.

didds

[stewamax]

Or your web presence could be something a simple as a Facebook BUSINESS page - with blurb regarding your services and contact details.You then point your domain and the www subdomain (as an example) to the FB business page. SSL certs already handled for you. And the reader doesn't need a FB account to read a basic business page.

It is worth noting though that the converse - embedding a web page into a FB business page via a 'tab' - won't work unless the web page is accessible https:

[dspp]

Having noticed that my website now shows up as ‘not secure’ I am contemplating whether to bother with a website at all. In the short term, I have to get an SSL and that’s in hand. It’s the medium to long-term that I am thinking about......

I’d welcome your comments.
BnC

I think that a website is the most cost-effective marketing you can get. Since you are B2B and not doing ecommerce, then a plain vanilla site that is content-heavy (as yours is, from your description) is absolutely perfect. So relax and keep going.

regards, dspp

[AndyPandy]

I've built a few websites, but not for others. Here's my 2p, for what it's worth.

If you are still looking for new Clients, then yes, for the cost of the Hosting each year it has to be worth having one. If you have enough direct clients and new ones via referrals to keep you going to retirement, then no, possibly not.

If it is not secure, two downsides are that Google Chrome says 'not secure' in the address bar and Google has stated that it penalises insecure websites in its rankings. The first might be perceived by some visitors as a negative as they won't know what it means so there could be that element of suspicion. The second is an unknown quantity. You say that you are in the top 5 for searches. I have a top 5 website that is insecure. Currently, content seems to be king in both cases, overriding the current penalty that Google is applying for being insecure. That may change in the future.

Assuming I've found the right one (did you work at Montagu Evans for a while? - if not, ignore the rest of this post!), the website design is dated and the way that the page structure is organised could be redesigned with modern methods that make it more Search engine friendly and also more readable on a mobile. You need to balance that against the cost of redesign and import of data and the short term loss of Search Engine position that you currently have. At least your current design is lean and will load fast.

Your website won't load if you just type in the website address, you need to add www. to it. You may want to look at that. In fact it says 'this website is currently unavailable' which is probably worse as people will then go away.

Your email address is not disguised. It is probably too late to do anything about (changing long established email addresses is big hassle), but spammers can easily pick up on it currently and use / sell on for junk mail. If you do redesign, go for a Contact Form or munge it by other means.


I'm better at criticism than praise. Clearly it is working for you, but could work better.

[stewamax]

It is probably true at the moment that, unlike B2C, B2B advertising is predominantly 'website' but I would question for how long: in the B2C space apps are already dominating and this trend will only continue. If you can manage to get your app on someone phone 'desktop', you are in a good position for further business.

Writing apps is a more specialised activity than writing websites using e.g. Wordpress (£free), an appropriate theme (say £50) and an online shopping catalogue and cart such as Woocommerce (£free for the basic version that can take you quite a long way). There are as yet no 'instant apps generators' of equivalent power. But one possible option is to use Cordova (£free) that allows you to build an app using pages from your website. There is little point in using existing pages - the user might as well go to your website - but it is relatively easy to create a select range of pages (e.g. This Month's Offers) customised for phone screens and using some of the features of the phone such as the camera.

[brightncheerful]

"AndyPandy"]I've built a few websites, but not for others. Here's my 2p, for what it's worth. Assuming I've found the right one (did you work at Montagu Evans for a while? -

Yes. I use Rapidweaver. The theme is customised by a third-party developer to my requirements, so too my RPI rent calculator which is quite possibly unique on the web. I've experimented with other themes but I was inspired by the look of a help section on a professional photography site that appeals to thousands of discerning customers. I'm aware my theme look is 'dated' (by modern trendy standards) but as you say the site loads fast, It is also easy to navigate: I've received loads of compliments for that! I have no plans to change the look. The site does look good on a mobile, in my target market people persevere. (I was into liquid layout long before it became popular.) I have no plans to retire (cannot afford to, misspent youth!)

Regarding your finding a "website unavailable' I think that was probably a link on my site to a different site which is unavailable. It was a day or so before I updated the wording my site (and deleted the link).

I'm not keen on contact forms. I prefer email link so I can put them anywhere as many as in want, whereas it's usual to have only one contact form. As for selling the email for junk mail, etc, I have an email spam interceptor but a few do slip through, not enough to concern.

Thank you for your critique. I shall bear in mind your comments.

Bnc

(Currently I waiting to hear from my ISP whether they can supply an Extended SSL. I note what you say about content reigning - which is going to put Google on the spot? - but I get the feeling that free and domain validation only SSLs are next in line to be demoted for SEO. Gotta think long-term!

[PinkDalek]

On the subject of your existing website generally, I have occasionally dipped in there and found the content of great use. I don't care one jot if it has bells and whistles etc nor that I see a warning!

Minor question but your footers shows © 2000. I'm no expert but shouldn't you perhaps show something along the lines of © 2000 - 2019 XYZ. All rights reserved. ?

I'd also link directly to your ICO Data protection register - entry details (in addition to providing the number, which you do).

I'd also consider making your Disclaimer more obvious. It is only becomes visible when clicking on your "Established 19XX".

[brightncheerful]

your footers shows © 2000

Amended.

Re Data Protection, I don't think it necessary to provide a link to the ICO site. Anyone that interested can check for themselves.

Re Disclaimer, I don't think it necessary to make it more obvious. I might however emphasise necessity to read it before reading or acting on any content.

Thanks

[PinkDalek]

... your footers shows © 2000 ...

Amended.

Only on the Welcome Page?

Re Disclaimer, I don't think it necessary to make it more obvious. I might however emphasise necessity to read it before reading or acting on any content.

Is that the parts now in red?

[brightncheerful]

Only on the Welcome Page?

Thanks for pointing that out. It's been a long time since I've tinkered with the basic set-up.

[brightncheerful]

My application for SSL EV has been rejected.

But only because the CA thinks that UK (England and Wales) businesses have to be registered with the government.

I am VAT registered but apparently that's not good enough.

[didds]

Why EV? just get the cheapest form of SSL cert going that doesn't need as "deep" a guarantee?

didds