Buying A Website – 7 Critical Factors That Make or Break Your Business

Buying A Website.

7 Critical Factors That Make or Break Your Business – Another of our Ezine articles. This article focuses on the Planning Stage of buying a website. Like building a house, building a website goes much better with planning and preparation ahead of buying a website.

Here are the 7 Critical Factors you must consider before buying a website. Enjoy.

By Terry Fisher

Buying a website, whether business, personal or for your hobby, can be a whole new experience to a person who does not yet have a web presence. Searches on Google can give you confusing results, ending in frustration. So you might be wondering, what’s the ultimate way to buy affordable websites.

Here are 7 critical factors to be considered before buying a website, and there is a hard way and an easy way to cover most of these.

1. Getting a Domain Name

When you buy a website, the first task is registering the correct domain name. A domain name should be chosen very carefully, and we recommend leaving it to the experts – your domain name can make or break your business. It should be precise and relevant to the subject matter of your business/profession/hobby.

Secondly, it is always better to choose a short domain name, because it is easy to remember. Despite the assertion that all the good domain names have gone, a good local web design company like ours has special tools and techniques that can result in a pleasant surprise.

2. Web Hosting Provider Selection

You should look for well-established, reliable web hosting providers when considering buying a website. The server should be fast and backed up by mirror servers. When a server hosts your website, there may be occasional times when there is excessive load or traffic that ultimately results in non-availability of your website. A mirror server acts as a standby and immediately transmits your web content when needed. Again, any local web design company will already have expertise in this area, saving you hours of research when buying affordable websites. If you let your local web design company handle web hosting for you, then you save on set up time and costs, and the technical aspects of web hosting are not your problem. Let us sort this for you.

3. Website Design

The next important factor to consider before buying a website is that of web design. The website should be designed in such a manner so that its main message is clear to the visitor. A poorly designed website turns customers away – the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve. A basic decision is the platform – WordPress, conventional HTML site, Joomla, etc. Most modern local web design companies go for WordPress these days, a great route to affordable websites that do not break the budget but look terrific.

4. Easy Navigation

A website should have easy navigation, including a sitemap to cover every piece of information on the site. The old business adage of “Make it easy for your customers to do business with you” is very relevant when you buy a website.

5. Colours and graphics

Likewise, the website should be easy on the eye. A “hard” coloured website is often abrasive and causes clients to click away. Moreover, the graphics should be optimized to appear faster on the screen; otherwise the visitor may leave the webpage, even before it gets fully loaded. Respect your visitor’s time when you buy a website and look for affordable websites that are graphically optimized. In particular, avoid Flash websites. Websites that use flash technology are always slower to load and have more to do with satisfying your website designers ego than satisfying your client’s needs.

6. SEO Optimization and Integrated Website Marketing

Before deciding on buying a website, look for SEO optimization plus integrated website marketing. Bit of a mouthful; SEO optimization is simply technical stuff necessary to get good Google Rankings, and best left to your local web design company. We can handle this for you.

Integrated Website Marketing includes adding YouTube videos to your website, creating supportive articles like this one, social bookmarking / networking etc. This should be part of any local web design package.

There are few things sadder than a website that is nicely built, looks good – but with no traffic coming to it. The easy solution lies in SEO and integrated website marketing, where the marketing aspect of your web presence is integrated within the web design package you buy; without proper marketing, the best-looking website may prove to be a dead investment.

7. Considering Quality Vs Affordability

Finally, think of balancing quality vs. affordability before deciding to buy a website. If you focus only on the quality aspects of a website, you may have to invest thousands of dollars. On the contrary, a great looking website does not need to be a cheap website.

So look for that rare combination of quality plus affordability when buying a website. Affordable websites that look great are our speciality.