Set up a functional website in a day – is it possible?
As a web developer with more than 700 small to medium website clients, I’m astounded at the over-simplified advice ANZ is offering business start-ups with its ANZ Business Ready package.
The ANZ’s website spruiks: “Get online in minutes and sell services and products”.
As web development professionals we spend hours consulting to small businesses about digital/online marketing and advertising and I know for a fact the ANZ cannot, in just one day, provide a small business with a website that works optimally in today’s competitive online marketplace. I believe that, as a major organisation, the ANZ has a duty of care to small businesses to offer them the best advice possible.
When you go to the hardware store and buy yourself a drill, the reality is that you don’t need a drill, you need a hole. It’s a similar story with websites. Your business doesn’t actually need a website, it needs clients. And to attract clients your website needs to have two core elements:
- It needs to be a Google trap. Your website must be highly visible in Google for searches of the products and/or services you sell in your location. Searching in Google for your business name does not qualify.
- Your website needs to convince users to take the desired action you require. Typically the action you want is one of the following: Pick up the phone and call you; walk in your front door; request a quote online; or purchase something.
I would be astounded if the ANZ can achieve this result for clients who take up its one-day website offer. What the ANZ is offering seems more like a checklist item for customers to tick off rather than the single most powerful marketing tool the client has at his or her disposal.
If the ANZ can achieve what it claims then I would say hats off to them, but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. If the bank can’t deliver a website that makes the client prominent in Google searches for what the client does, where he or she does it, then the ANZ is potentially being negligent to new businesses finding their feet in a dog-eat-dog world.
Websites should never ever be a simple tick-list item for new businesses. A website should be the basis for their marketing moving forward.
“If you want to hide a dead body put it on page 2 of Google”