No!

A website is not like advertising. Put simply, a website’s purpose is to serve the customer, not sell the customer. It’s about what the customer wants to know or do, not what you’re trying to tell them or get them to do. If your site serves your customers well, they’ll do the selling for you, for free, by recommending you to their friends.

Advertising is Interruption Marketing

The purpose of advertising is to get a message in front of you, to get you interested in something or persuade you to do something while you’re trying to do something else.

Advertising works by interrupting you. Very few people look at advertising for its own sake, except people who work in advertising agencies. TV ads interrupt the programs you’re watching. Newspaper ads are interspersed with the news content so you’ll see them. Magazine ads use gimmicks like insert cards or pages that are smaller or larger or thicker than normal to interrupt your browsing or reading. Billboards interrupt your driving concentration to get you to look at them. Website ads, like print, are interspersed with the site content or they flash or move or even obscure the site content to get you to look at them.

A Website is Your Place of Business

A website is very much like your actual physical place of business. When someone comes to your restaurant or store you don’t need to interrupt them, try to get their attention or entice them to drive over. They’ve already made that choice. They’ve gotten in the car and driven to your place and are ready to see the menu or find what they’re looking for. The advertising, the interruption if any, happened somewhere else, while they were doing something else. It got them in the door. Now, it’s your job to satisfy their needs.

Think about driving to a restaurant and finding some guy on the sidewalk in front who won’t let you see the menu until you listen to his little canned sales spiel? Even if you could push him aside to get in, how would that make you feel about going inside?

Nobody Sees Your Website Until They Actually Go There

If you think about it, using your website for advertising makes no sense at all. Unlike a real store, nobody ever just happens to be passing by a web site. Remember, your website is invisible until someone decides to type in that URL. Flashy graphics and music aren’t going to attract anyone, because no one sees it until they’ve already made a conscious choice to go there. They went there because they are ready to buy and wanted to know something. Anything you do that delays them finding what *they* want is making them unhappy and likely to leave, just like that guy on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

Nobody Wants to Look at Ads

The most effective thing that advertising does on a website is drive visitors away! Think about that guy on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Would you go into that place after being interrupted on the sidewalk outside? I certainly wouldn’t.

The Customer wants Control

If a customer comes to your place of business, they don’t want to be subjected to your idea about what they should see. They should drive the experience completely. If they want to see a video, certainly let them choose to, but if all they want to know is what vegetarian choices there are, they should be able to find out as quickly as possible. For a restaurant, I have to believe that the vast majority of people just want to see the menu and the prices. That’s why restaurants post their menus outside the door. That puts  the customer in control of the experience and the decision.

Good Design

Now, does that mean your storefront shouldn’t be beautiful, clean and inviting? Of course not! But once someone comes to your place of business all the design should be oriented toward making them comfortable and at ease, not putting them on guard against selling pressure.

If I’m trying to decide where I want to go for dinner, yes, a beautifully designed site is a big plus in setting my expectation for a quality experience. But it has to be passive and unobtrusive. Anything automatically animated attempts to put the seller in control of the experience, by definition.

In Summary

Treat your website visitors the same way you would treat a customer who walked into your store. Help them, don’t make them endure the sales process.

If you run your own servers or have installed applications running on Windows desktop machines in your office, you know what a pain the neck it is keeping it all up-to-date and how much it costs for version upgrades.

That was the way the software world worked for decades. You bought software and installed it onto your machine and then had to keep it updated and compatible with the operating system, usually Windows, and other pieces of software that you used. If you don’t have an IT staff, this can be challenging. And installed software has other issues. You or people you work with can’t easily get to it from outside your office and if you have multiple computers, you have to update all of them.

Today, there’s a better, cheaper and simpler way to do things. It’s called Cloud Computing, or Software as a Service (SaaS). What it means is that instead of having to buy hardware and software and install and maintain it, you use your web browser to access a service that runs the application on servers somewhere out on the internet. You don’t know where and you don’t have to care where. The service provider takes care of version updates, backups and all the other maintenance tasks you have to take care of now, usually for a monthly fee that’s much less than what you’re paying for a software maintenance contract, not to mention the initial cost of the software and your own lost time and effort doing things that aren’t directly related to your business. And even if you have an IT staff, you’re paying them to take care of the problem for you. How much does one full-time employee cost?

Let’s take backups as an example. If you do your own backups you have to take care of physically storing the backup media in a safe place. If you use a large network drive for your backup, you have to be concerned about it crashing (all disk drives fail, it’s just a question of when).

Unless you produce many gigabytes of data every day, you can backup all your data to a service offered by Amazon called S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s ridiculously cheap, only 15 cents/gigabyte/month. Most people have far less than 10 gigabytes of their own data that needs to be backed up. So for less than $1.50/month you can have the peace of mind that your data is safe, offsite at S3. And since Amazon has thousands of users of S3, they can afford bulletproof security, redundant servers and power and their own backups. So even your backup is backed up!

I can help you determine if cloud solutions would be right for your business and help you choose the right ones.

Most assuredly not! Actually teenagers, as has always been their wont, want privacy from their parents and adults in general, so their big thing is text messaging with their mobile phones. Teens have been discovering Twitter lately, but the vast majority of people on Twitter are over 30. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is older adults. Social media and social networking are for everyone! Check out some of the stats on these pages:

• 2009 Social Network Analysis Report (Ignite Social Media)
• 2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report (IStrategyLabs)
• Revealing the People Defining Social Networks (Brian Solis blog)

This data is relatively recent, mid 2009, but whenever looking at social media and networking stats, be aware that the landscape is always changing and quickly! The best approach to learning or evaluating social networking is to ask someone who’s deeply involved. As with New England weather, if you think you understand the demographics, wait a minute!

A domain name is your site’s address on the web. For instance, this site’s domain name is “jcascio.com”. In order to be valid, a domain must be registered. It’s the internet equivalent of a trademark registration. It gives you the exclusive right to use that name. But owning the trademark for a business name doesn’t give you an office or a factory or employees or other assets. It’s just the name. And domain names are exactly the same. They give you the right to use the name but don’t give you a server or network bandwidth or content or pictures or e-commerce when someone types your domain name into their browser.

The internet equivalent of the business’s office or factory, what makes it real, is a web hosting account. And just like floor space or equipment you can own it or rent it. Very few businesses actually own their own servers nowadays. They rent server space, compute power and bandwidth from hosting providers. These providers may own hundreds of servers in what are known as “co-los”, which is short for “co-located”. And almost always, smaller hosting providers (like me, for instance) actually resell server capacity from a yet larger provider.

Domain name registrations must be renewed periodically, usually every year. A typical .com renewal should only cost $10-$30 per year. Most domain name registrars offer multi-year renewels at somewhat better unit pricing. If you have an established business and don’t plan on changing the name, getting a multi-year registration is probably a worthwhile convenience, but dollar wise, it’s not significant.

Some providers package up domain name registrations with a hosting package. This is not particularly advantageous to you the customer, in my estimation, because it unnecessarily binds you to that provider. Any site developer worth their salt can set up the hosting and the registration separately and this makes things easier in case you have to change either registrars or hosting providers for any reason. Registrations are usually pretty stable, but hosting requirements or site designers may change, so give yourself the flexibility to change one without changing the other.

First of all, “good on ya” for realizing that every business needs a web presence nowadays. It’s become as necessary as having a phone; in some ways even more important. An ever increasing number of people, especially under 60 or so years old, don’t use phone books anymore. They look up everything (and I mean everything) on the web. They want to see your website, they want to see it on their desktop or laptop computer, on their mobile smartphone, they want to search in Google for businesses that do what you do.

And you want them to both find you and easily find what they want to know about your business. Let me repeat this point because it’s crucial to understanding what the purpose of a site is. The most important thing about your website is how easily visitors can find what they want to know. It’s not about what you want to tell them. A website is not advertising, it’s customer service!

So, a good exercise to start creating your website is to make a list of the questions or topics that you are most often asked by your customers or prospective customers.