The point of a small corporate website is not really to advertise, it’s not to go out there and grab people by the collar and shout “BUY OUR STUFF!”. Rather, it is to communicate information about your company to the people who are actively looking for it. If I search for “plumber in Paris” I don’t want to see every plumber in a 50 mile radius telling me “we’re the best” “no they’re bad, we’re the best!”. I want clear, concise information on which to base the decision of which companies to approach.

Year-round availability

The obvious, yet often overlooked advantage of a website over a phone directory listing is that people can find information 24/7, every day of the year. If I search a phone book for plumbers in Paris, I can only call them for more info during business hours. If I want to spend my evening putting together a list of plumbers to call, those with websites will be the ones who make it onto that list.

Room to expand

While running your one-man plumbing business you notice that a lot of customers have started asking if you know of anywhere they can buy a particular new, fashionable style of bathroom suite. Wouldn’t it be great to reply “those are listed on my site, you can find a list of stores and prices”, and then take a cut of the commisson for every sale? You already have a site, so adding the extra info will be a lot less costly and you’ll have the advantage of already having a secure spot in the search engine rankings.

Get your expertise known

Blogging for your business may sound cliche, but the benefits are difficult to overstate. You may be one plumber among thousands in Paris right now but how would you like to be known as the expert in extra-quick bathroom installation or the plumber who quite literally “wrote the book”? Blogging about your area of expertise, even rarely, serves two main purposes. It gets your name out there to people looking for help or information on the subject, establishing you as an authority in your niche, and it helps your site stay high on search engine lists (the search engines love it when you have content that’s constantly changing).

Be careful!

It’s often said that a website that makes your business look bad is worse than no website at all, and this is true. The majority of web users today know the difference between a “normal looking” website and this. That said, there’s no need to make everything super-modern and flashy either, it really depends on your target audience.

A simple corporate theme is more than enough to get you started, you can add your own logo and be up and running in a matter of hours. Alternatively many web designers will gladly adapt an existing theme for much less than they’d charge to create something from scratch, if you want your site to be more unique. Whichever approach you take, there really aren’t many reasons to avoid having a website for your small business.