Before digging into the dangers of not having a website, first it’s important to understand why you’d have one in the first place.

Merely having a website for the sake of having one is not a good reason.  There are good websites and bad websites.  Some websites are an asset to your business, other websites won’t make any difference to your business, while some websites could potentially harm your business.

Obviously you want to have a website that enhances your business!

Your website should act as an information resource and marketing tool that presents your organization, product and/or service in the best light possible.

The main purposes of a website are:

• To built trust between you and your prospects, and/or strengthen your brand/organisation’s identity.
• To provide your prospects with information that entices them to purchase your product or service, perhaps directly from your website.  Or even purchase directly from your website.
• To provide prospects with your contact information, or an opportunity for you to extract their contact information and follow-up with them in the future.

It’s important to understand everybody is different and each individual has a different preference how they obtain information.  Some people go straight for the phone, other people send an Email, while others research extensively before doing anything.  Your website should service all of the above preferences.

These days many people use Internet to conduct research, but they can only find information if you’ve put it there.  What do you think will happen if your competitor has a website and you don’t?

The dangers of NOT having a website:

1. Your website operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long, you however cannot. So your website can be providing information to your prospects even when you’re fast asleep.
2. Your business card only has room for a finite amount of information. Despite handing out your card you don’t always have time to build sufficient rapport so your prospects may not feel comfortable enough to call you immediately.  Your website can act like a middleman to convince them to contact you later.
3. When your prospects search the Internet for keywords related to your products or services they won’t be able to find any information about what you offer.
4. Worse still they may find your competitor’s website instead which could give them huge advantage.
5. The biggest danger is you miss countless opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.  Millions of people use the Internet daily so you’d be insane not to take advantage of this!

So there are five reasons to have a website, but as I mentioned earlier, merely having a website isn’t enough.  Your website must be easy to use, filled with valuable content and accessible to your prospects.

In the next article I’ll be looking into the 5 Really Bad Website Mistakes which hurt your website’s performance.