A business website is more than words on a page.

If you are planning to get a website, and planning to make money through that website, it is not a good idea to go for the cheapest site you can get. You are better to spend that extra money and have your site optimized for search engines, so your potential clients are able find your website.

Let's say you have a business that offers guided wildlife photography tours and hut style accommodation, transportation to and from places to see your local wildlife and you are thinking about getting, or need your present website rebuilt.

When you think of a website, if you can compare it to the price a brochure, a website is by far cheaper than brochures. It would it cost to have a professional brochure designed, and printed in full color, around $2300 for 5000 brochures right?

Then realistically you can only get them displayed locally, and have to pay tourist places to display them. Lets just say round figures $1000, to have your brochure displayed. And for each time you wanted to get a brochure reprinted, another $1900 per 5000.

If you spent the same $3300 for the design, printing and displaying your brochure, on a well designed website, you would get the website name, the hosting (both combined total about $150 a year), you should receive special extra work called SEO(search Engine Optimization), this done on your website, to make it rank well in search engine results, for the sort of searches people wanting your services would search for, so people can actually find your website, it's like putting up signs so people can find your business is situated.

Most website designers, just make the website, and although it may look great, it can only be found but doing a search for your business name. And let's face it, if they knew your business name, they would probably ring you up, rather than look you up on the internet.

People all over the world can see it the website 24/7, unlike getting changes made to a brochure, small changes cost around $25-$35 each or you can do them yourself. And as long as you keep paying $150 a year, your website stays on the internet unlike brochures which you have to keep paying to get reprinted.

If you choose the right website designers/builders, they would make sure you had a CMS (content management system) which means you can make small changes to the web pages yourself if you wanted. The CMS would include a photo gallery, where you could display some of your clients photos, which will interest your possible clients, and you adding more photos when you feel like it. A good web designer would ensure you knew how to use the CMS.

You could also have online booking and even paying a deposit for your various services maybe even a mini calendar showing what parts of the year are best for what particular wildlife viewing and that would show when you had space for more bookings. These extras could be added later as the site becomes more successful.

Thinking about your website again, in order to get more visitors, search engines consider your site relevant if you add more web pages over time, and will rank your site better as it notices changes to your website.

With a CMS website, you can simply add your own web pages, maybe you could ask clients to write testimonials, or write short stories about their experience using your services. Or start a blog type web page, where you can write about things that are happening in your immediate area, local or international community that could or have impacted on your business. Or make your own web page talking about funny stories of clients you have had.

You may find a web designer to put your site on an easy payment plan, where you can pay a deposit and then regularly weekly, or monthly payments and if you then have the extra money you can pay off the balance, most web designers like to be paid up front, but if a web designer believes in the websites they build, and know they will do the best it can, they won't feel threatened by accepting payments.

So to sum up. If you are going to have a website made, spend a little more on it, have it optimized for search engines(SEO), ask for a CMS website so you can make small changes yourself, and make sure you website doesn't become stagnant, add a new story or article ever few months, as the search engines will see these changes, know they site is active, and keep it ranking well in search engines.

Lynn Bishop.

Lynn is the people person at her online business Canz Design. She has a good working knowledge of all things website and graphic design. She talks to new clients, first to explains what is possible, she'll talk about the clients budget, she helps them define their needs from their wants and help them get the best possible service. She then explains to the web designer exactly what needs doing. Lynn has worked a number of times with an Indian programming firm, since she could speak geek speak she translated exactly what the clients wants. She also beta tested the resulting programs again telling the programmer what was wrong with the program and how to fix it.