You want to reach your audience – to advocate, attract clients, or sell products. A website is a fundamental tool for doing that. But many organizations build their website too early. You need to be online but you may not need your own website right away. Most organizations move through three phases when building their online presence: creating awareness, defining their business, and increasing their impact or revenue.
Stage 1. Building Awareness
At first, you need traction. Begin with word of mouth or by connecting on social media. Many people have started and nurtured successful businesses this way.
Stage 2. Defining Your Business
The next step is building credibility online. Your audience needs to see that you exist and are credible. Even a single page website establishes your online home.
Stage 3. Increasing Impact or Revenue
The third step is building out your website to fully articulate your message and in some cases, to deliver your service or product directly.
What you need depends on the stage of your business. If you’re just starting out, begin with social media. With success there, you’ll want to clearly articulate your message without distractions. A standalone website achieves this.
Let’s find the best option for creating your website.
1. No website
You can stick with social media for promoting your organization. You’re trading potential exposure for control over your content. Social media platforms limit what you can do, limit how you appear, and if you even appear. They can reduce your visibility and suspend your account and you have little to no recourse when that happens. And when a platform goes bad, like X (Twitter) did in 2022 with Musk’s acquisition, then users are stuck or need to rebuild their social presence elsewhere.
2. Site builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify
These tools aim to simplify the entire process with beautiful templates and editing capabilities. They take care of maintenance so you don’t need to worry about that. Along with generic site builders, this category includes specialized builders for specific purposes. Shopify allows business owners to build and manage their online store with pre-built templates and a user-friendly interface.
All of these platforms now include AI tools for generating all or part of your website. I’ve tested these tools and they can be a good option for creating the first pass of your site. They don’t yield anything amazing but they do produce something serviceable which may be enough for some people.
Site builders offer convenience and they aim for ease of use. The trade-off is functionality. By necessity, they limit what you can do on their site. The site builders are feature-rich and for most business owners, the site builders will offer everything they need. When you need functionality that the site builder doesn’t offer, then you need to find a way to either integrate that or use a different solution. I have built custom websites specifically to do something my clients couldn’t achieve with their Squarespace websites.
3. Custom-built self-hosted website
The final option is a custom-built, self-hosted website. Here we get total control over design and functionality.
I specialize in building websites for organizations and individuals making a difference in the world. I’m convinced of the advantages of controlling your platform and having the flexibility to build your website exactly how you want it to look and function.
Of these three options, a custom-built site is the most complex to develop and maintain. I develop websites using WordPress, the world’s leading Content Management System (CMS) , which includes a user-friendly interface allowing clients to edit their own websites without touching any code.
Where do you go from here? Depending on where you’re at with your organization, any of the above, including no website at all, can be suitable for you. Just starting out? Concentrate on building your connections. Ready to be authoritative online? Build your one-page site to build credibility. Established and growing? Flesh out your website to better tell your story and maybe even to deliver your services online.
Let’s talk about the best strategy for supporting your organization online.
Posted under Communication, General, Web Development
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