Small Business Websites: Often The First View Into Your Business
Living and working on Hilton Head island, it always strikes me how many businesses in the Travel and Tourism Industry either don’t have a website or have a dated or poorly built website. I look around Hilton Head and Savannah and see these sites everywhere, including Hilton Head’s own site. I think it must be a fear factor in undertaking the project. Just the idea of being online scares these businesses so they ignore it. Either that or they don’t see the value in an effective web presence. But it is very important.
Tourists are not leaving their computers at home anymore and when they come one vacation they use the computers to make decisions about where they are going to spend money. The Internet allows visitors to quickly compare charter boats, jet skis, or restaurants online. It is imperative that these businesses provide decent pictures, the benefits of their service, rates and directions or they will lose business to companies that do have that on their website.
It isn’t neccassary to have the greatset site ever with super flash movies and music and video (although video used properly can be VERY effective). We need to take brochures and marketing materials and put them online. For example, I recently completed a site for a Hilton Head Island Mechanic, Island Motors. This site is not fancy, and doesn’t even have an email form on it. The owner doesn’t have time for that time of thing and doesn’t want to let emails sit and get stale. But, when a tourist is in Town and there car is overheating, when they don’t go to the yellow pages, or even if they do, his site is going to let people know what he does and where he is. This online brochure is not expensive, as a matter of fact at raise Interactive we usually charge around $600 for a site like this, not thousands, and we keep them online for $15/month. Its effective and it works. I have another client, a Hilton Head Island Vacation Home, who needed an attractive web prescence to drive traffic to through such sites as VRBO and Craigslist. Again, simple and easy, it gets 100s of hits a day and its rare that a day goes by without the contact form filled out.
So we encourage people, if youb have questions, fill out our form. We are happy to work with you to build your business online. We don’t double talk or use crazy buzzwords, we just build effective websites.