Why Social Media Isn’t Enough
By: Raoul Didisheim
Tags: Website Platforms, Social Media, Website Design, Online Business, Make Money Online

Unless your under the impression that you can grow your business by osmosis, you have to have an online presence.

How else are people going to find you? If you think word of mouth alone will do it for you, think again, especially in this environment.

You have to work the digital landscape to reach your audience. Depending on your business, you need to participate in Social at some level, but that may not be enough. You want an online identity that represents you or your organization. And that is a good website.

This may seem obvious to some, but I have many clients who just don’t put much effort into their websites even though they participate a lot on Social.

So why do you want a website when Social is so dominant on the internet?

Because you need to have a place that is the core of your online activity or any activity that mentions you.

As opposed to a Social media page, even one where you are active, a website gives you complete control over form, function design, and what you want to say. You have authority over the products and services you provide, how you do it, and with whom.

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn — each looks the same in terms of design, and all have restrictions in content.

Also, a dedicated website gives the appearance of a real business and more authority than a Social Media presence can by itself.

Again, Social is super important, but it’s like a business card.

If you’re keeping it simple but want to curate your own voice. It’s not hard to set up a decent site yourself.

It used to be that creating your own basic site yourself required hiring a developer to create something custom. You also had to know about servers, FTP, HTML, site registrars, and web hosting.

Now you or your small business can have a nice looking mobile-ready site without having to understand the technology behind it.

I work with larger companies that still need to spend a great deal to get custom-designed and programmed sites that rank competitively. But there’s no need for smaller businesses and individuals to spend that much effort.

Site-building platforms like Squarespace and Wix are improving and easy to use. These platforms allow you to choose from well-designed templates with drag and drop interfaces. You can also easily add a blog, media players, and ecommerce.

So what platform is best? There is an increasing amount to choose from.

If you feel like you simply don’t have the time to do it yourself, hire someone. But it’s still worth knowing about the different platforms so that you make the right choice for your business.

Web design platforms can be either subscription or non-subscription-based and have different feature sets.

Non-subscription-based platforms:

Non-subscription-based platforms allow you to host your website on most servers, usually through a hosting company that you pay for separately. You will likely also have to pay for additional plugins and other features.

One of the most popular non-subscription-based platforms is WordPress. The WordPress platform is free, but almost everything else is extra, like hosting, domain name, plugins, and template themes. But you have the option of choosing from a variety of vendors.

A couple of other popular and versatile non-subscription-based platforms like WordPress are Joomla and Drupal. They are not as easy to use but can better suit your website depending on the functionality you’re after. You have to do the research.

Subscription-based platforms:

Examples of subscription-based platforms include Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly. These are, as their name states, fixed subscription fee platforms. One fee covers everything. They generally have tiered pricing, including ecommerce capability, and even free for something super basic.

Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and others of this type very user-friendly and have better customer support. Anyone can make a decent-looking site using their built-in templates.

This is both the strength and weakness of these platforms. You are tied to the product and its functionality.

Also, subscription-based platforms aren’t as versatile as open-source platforms that are consistently growing their selection of third-party templates, plugins, and other features.

Eccomerce Platforms:

If you are selling products online, it’s a little more complicated and time-consuming, but you can still do it yourself.

All the platforms mentioned above are capable of handling ecommerce but might not be the best for it.

The most used ecommerce platforms are WordPress with the Woo Commerce Plugin, Shopify, and Magento.

If you already have a WordPress site, it’s easy to install the WooCommerce plugin for credit card processing and product listings. This means it’s easy to launch a site and add e-commerce later.

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that is affordable and user-friendly. It provides many online tutorials that you can refer to and has pretty good technical support.

Magento has been a long-time standard for many large brands and it’s feature-rich.

The problem is it can get quite expensive if your site gets big. Even The Community edition for small websites can be pretty pricey. It’s really better suited to bigger budgets.

There are a bunch more ecommerce platforms that are worth mentioning for small and medium-sized businesses. OSCommerce, which is open-source, BigCommerce, Volusion, and Zen Cart.

These are just a few options to give you an idea. There are plenty more.

Understanding what you need is a learning process, whether you are doing it yourself or working with a consultant.

If you need to launch and have to decide, WordPress is the best choice because there is so much you can do and change.

If you know exactly what your site needs. Pick the platform the best aligns with those requirements.

These are just a few platforms to give you an idea. There are plenty of others.

So what are you waiting for? Augment your Social Media presence and build a website to drive traffic to it and gain new customers.

If you wish to talk about your online presence and strategy, please feel free to reach out.