DECEMBER 2018 422business.com and 422bizmag.com ROUTE 422 BUSINESS ADVISOR11

MANAGING YOURBUSINESS WEBSITE: 7 Things to Consider

By Randy Rowe, Hureka Technologies, Inc.

At Hureka Technologies, we have served over 50 businesseswith new website designs and digital marketing services.Consequently, we understand the challenges business ownersface while managing a website. Be it for just maintaining the

online presence, or as a key driver in your business’s value delivery cycle, a website makes a huge difference, yet it’s astonishing that over 46 percent of small businesses in the U.S. still don’t have a fully operational website.

I say, even if you’re just starting out withless than five employees, you require awebsite. Americans are spending more than35 hours every month browsing online. It’smuch easier to reach them, in fact, a necessi-ty to reach them via online channels. About88.5 percent of the Americans are Internetusers. That’s a lot of people who could beinteracting with your website, connectingwith your business online, and bringing youadditional revenue.

First you need a domain name. Ideally,your business’s website domain should besimilar to your business name. If it’s notavailable, you can use the name of yourarea or your city along with the businessname, especially if you’re a location specificbusiness. Try not to use numbers, hyphensand difficult to spell names. Your websitename should be easy to spell and recall.

Once you have your domain ready, it’stime to look for a technology partner — tosetup a website, customer alerts & feedbackprocesses, digital marketing & saleschannels and conversion optimization. Ifyou already have a website for yourbusiness, take a good look at your websitetoday and see if it’s ready to generatebusiness for you. Is it good for your brand?Does it convert? If no, you need to get itredone.

Choosing a good technology partnergets most of the job done for you but youstill have some key decisions to make, firstof which is picking a content managementsystem (CMS). A CMS is a set of relatedsoftwares that are put together to help anInternet user create digital content. Yourwebsite cannot run without a CMS and thecost and effort to make and maintain awebsite significantly differs with yourchoice of CMS.

Two options for CMS are Wordpressand Drupal. While Wordpress websites arecheaper to develop, Drupal is a favorite ofbusiness owners for the security, scalabilityand functionalities it has to offer. However,Drupal is complex and requires profession-al assistance for maintenance and upkeep.The overall cost of setting up a websitedepends on the features you’re looking forand not just on the CMS you pick. Nextmonth I’ll discuss the features available...until then take five minutes to reassess yourbusiness website. Do you need onecompletely from scratch or does yourexisting one require an upgrade? Decideand take action today! Hureka Technologies is here to help any businesswith SEO, website design, and digital marketing.Contact randy@hurekatek.com or call 215.816.8300.