I had the good fortune to talk before a group of small business owners last night. My presentation was about how a website should fit into a businesses’ overall marketing strategy. They were a very receptive audience.

I talked about what a website is (a collection of interconnected documents) and what it isn’t (IM, email, RSS, a listing on your local chamber of commerce website) and I went on to give examples of businesses and how each business used their website differently (based on their overall strategy of how they wanted to interact with customers).

Not every business needs a website - whether you need a website or not depends on how you want to generate your customers and how you want to dialogue with them. There are also as many ways to define a website as there are to define a business. A restaurant may only need a simple brochure site with the essential basics - brand look and feel, phone, fax, address, directions, and menu. A realtor’s site will need to go further to generate leads - a clear call to action, a subscription form, feedback process (automatic emails), etc.

The difference between an effective site (and thus a website that costs no more than it should) and a website that is a useless money sink is simple - planning. Every website should have a mini strategic business plan to focus it (and its owners) on what it needs to do.

What I tried to leave my fellow business owners with were the following ideas:

  • Have a goal for your website - and do only that - focus on it - and your website will cost less and be more effective.
  • You don’t have to know how to do something - you only have to know what you want.
  • Nothing is free - even if there isn’t a dollar cost there is a cost in time and emotional dollars.
  • A good website acts like a garden - it never stops needing attention - plan on this.
  • Stay excited - if you aren’t passionate about what you are doing, no one else will be excited either. Make sure your website reflects why you do what you do.