Even if you’re not planning on selling online, a well-crafted site is essential for any business.

Q: My business is very small, just me and two employees, and our product really can’t be sold online. Do I really need a website?

A: That’s a good question. In fact, it’s one of the most important and most frequently asked questions of the digital business age. I personally have been asked this one question more times than I could count, yet my answer has always remained the same. “Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.”

Also, don’t be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can’t be sold online. Nowadays, there’s very little that can’t be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

Let me clarify one point: I’m not saying you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you should certainly be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

That said, it’s not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a physical store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost. (Unless of course your target demographic happens to be colorblind monkeys.)

One of the great things about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well-designed site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I’ve seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

You also mention that yours is a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don’t care if you’re a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don’t have a website, you’re losing business to other companies that do.

Think of this, 75 years ago, the American population felt that the telephone was an expensive luxury and not crucial to business growth.  That sentiment continued for 30 years.  As social communication trends changed, businesses changed to insure profitability.  Use of the Internet will only increase in the next ten years.

For those who may say “a website won’t attract our type of customers,” keep this in mind; the internet targets everyone in almost all demographics.  And those demographic shift and change.  Ten years less than 50% of the population used the internet.  Five years ago, primary users were people who worked in offices in jobs that were above the median income level.  Three years ago the fastest growing demographic for internet use was minor children.  Today it is retirees.  8 out of every ten people you meet in America uses a computer at least once a week.  “Are your potential customers the other 2 who don’t?”

Here’s the exception to my rule: It’s actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, “Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful site for our customers!” or it screams, “Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!”

Your website is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.

Decided to play around with another digital business card design. Check it out at www.jonathanlburton.com.

Interested in getting your own personalized digital business card? We’d love to get one designed for you, now starting at just $149! *

Contact us for more details.

*Price of $149 is for design and development only. Other charges such as domain registration and website hosting may apply. Offer subject to change.

Email Marketing by Constant Contact®, in association with Sketchbook Media Group, is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members. You’ll create high-impact, professional-looking emails—quickly and with no technical expertise. And, most importantly, you’ll build strong connections with your audience that lead to referrals, repeat business and loyalty.

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• Choose from more than 300 easily customized email templates—or create your own from scratch.
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We just launched a mini concept site for Sketchbook Web Design!

This mini-site is more an experiment for us to use some new fun designs and nifty css stylings. Think of it as more of an online business card. A clean crisp concept website will all the main information a potential client may want to see, without inundating them with tremendous amount of information to sift through. Not to mention we think it just looks cool.

Check it out here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is slowly fading to be overshadowed by big brother Digital Asset Optimization (DAO). DAO is still dependent on search engines but shifts focus from strictly text based files to all digital media files. DAO is essentially SEO 2.0.

• Images
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Flash Animation
• MP3 Downloads
• Social Network

These types of files, in addition to the text, create an interactive user environment that appeals to today’s searcher. But if the search engine doesn’t know these multimedia files are there, it can’t suggest your site in a targeted results list. Digital Asset Optimization pitches all of your site’s content.

Services like Google Image Search and Blog Search allow users to find your site through all of its content, not just a text file with a word count long enough for the crawler to include it. Digital Asset Optimization alerts the crawlers that you have images and other multimedia and defines the content.

You put a lot of time and effort into providing the best possible website for your business to attract customers. The more dynamic you can make it, the more appealing it is to visitors. An interesting podcast can bring you many more backlinks than a well written article alone. Digital Asset Optimization allows you to utilize specific media searches. Better than that, DAO lets you take advantage of other services like Google Alerts or MSN Related Videos.

Optimizing today’s web content means telling search engines about not only your text content, but also videos, music files, flash animations, images, social networking and other files. Searchers are cruising the information highway for entertainment as much as research and information sharing. Multimedia sites require multimedia optimization to tap into that traffic.

Sketchbook Media Group now has a partnership with Constant Contact® so we can offer you state-of-the-art Email Marketing services!

It’s a great tool to build customer loyalty, increase referrals, and promote repeat business.

We’ve teamed up with Constant Contact, the leading email marketing service, focused exclusively on small-business needs. That means we can bring you a proven, powerful and cost-effective way to stay in touch–and stay connected with–your customers and prospects. In fact, Email Marketing complements your current promotions, and takes advantage of what loyal and satisfied customers can do for your business – referrals, repeat purchases, and increased revenue.

Email Marketing makes it easy for you to:

• Communicate regularly with your customers and remind them of your value, so they’ll think of you first
• Easily create and send high-impact, professional-looking email communications in no time at all
• Review, and learn from, your email results with revealing, easy-to-read reports that show you who opened your emails, what links they clicked on, and more
• Build and segment your list of email addresses, so that you can send focused, tailored emails that get results.®