November 16th, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
Our first attorney, who was an expert in company law, did not have a website. He had started on his web design but did not know what to do with it. He thought having a static web design was passé and was not sure why having a website was useful. As we started working on lawyer web design packages at Small Biz Express, we’ve had this question come up often.
Small Biz Express takes a different approach to lawyer web design. To us, web design is always the last step in the process. Business needs come first. Here are three strong business reasons why we think lawyers need a website
Better conversion of referral business
Like most small businesses, lawyers get a bulk of their customers through referrals. These prospects will look up the referred lawyer up Google, look at the website and then decide on contacting the lawyer. The easier it is to access the information, the more likely the person will get to you. So having a site that is optimized so that your website comes up when someone searches your name on Google is really a must. Small Biz Express in all it’s lawyer web design packages does submissions to Google and other search engines to ensure that this happens.
Managing customer relationships
Instead of emailing large files back and forth, internet can be a great tool to manage documents. Small Biz Express as a part of the lawyer web design package offers a file share system that enables the lawyer and client to share documents. The client can access the folder and just deposit the documents. The lawyer gets an alert email. Different clients’ documents are in separate folders with secure access. Our lawyer clients love this aspect of our lawyer web design package.
Underlining your expertise
Your website gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise by posting your views. You could also have prospects ask questions and answer some questions to build engagement with your audience.
In this era where everyone is online, lawyers can ill afford not to invest in a website for themselves. But rather than getting a website for the sake of it, get a web design that meets your core business needs as a lawyer.
Tags: Lawyer Web Design, Small business website design, Website help for Lawyers
Posted in Small Busines Website Design | No Comments »
September 30th, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
Fact1: Consumer usage of internet is growing dramatically.
Fact 2: Small businesses are woefully underpenetrated in using the internet.
These are the two simple facts that drove us to launch Small Biz Express focusing on small business web design services.
Small Business website design has been a tough nut to crack. The approach that we saw most providers of small business web design take was “do it yourself” model and assume that small business owners would design their own websites based on templates. We spoke to many business owners, realized that this was far from reality and launched the “do it for you” small business web design model where Small Biz Express takes care of all aspects of website design.
Since then, we’ve realized that the tough part about small business web design is getting the price-service equation right. Small businesses do not want to spend a lot of money on web design. There are lots of players, the services get confusing and so price is one parameter that business owners use to decide on their web design provider.
On the other hand, you get what you pay for. So even among our competitors in the low cost “Do it for you” small business web design business, there are severe restrictions on how much you can change things. The problem with this approach has been that many business owners are dissatisfied with their website, never really own it in their minds and end up shutting it as soon as things become a little tough and they are looking for expenses to reduce.
SmallBiz Express take on small business web design was to use pre-existing designs as starting point and then make whatever changes business owners wanted. We would be lying if we said this process of small business website design is a profitable practice. It has afforded us a lot of learning but spending many weeks for a $399 small business web design project gets to be very unprofitable.
But we’ve learnt from this approach to website design. We think the industry of small business web design has focused on “web design” and less on “small business” and what the web can do for them. Folks in the website design industry understand websites and technology more and the business itself less. Small Biz Express learning has been to focus on the business. We increasingly are coming to understand that focus on just small business web design is focusing on the skin. Web design for small businesses needs to focus on functionality- on what services and sales support the website can help small business owners deliver to their customers.
So we get into building functionality that really helps business owners as a core part of small business web design. But how do we then keep the costs low? We have been working hard at it. One answer is re-use of functionality. Small Biz Express builds one application and then rolls it out among many business owners to reduce costs. What about differing needs of differing business owners? Small Biz Express is trying to address this through functionality based on different vertical segments.
I am not sure we’ve cracked the code on small business website design. Many are trying and it would be arrogant of us to assume that we at Small Biz Express have a superior understanding of the small business web design industry. We’ll hopefully get to a happy place between cost and creating a website that is a part of small business owners’ core operation soon and make a big difference in a business owner’s life!
Tags: small business web design, Small business website design, small business website design company, small business website help, web design, website design
Posted in Small Busines Website Design | No Comments »
August 31st, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
Most people navigate the internet through Search Engines. Even when someone knows the domain name, they type the domain name into Google. So one would assume that small business owners invest as much time into Search Engine Optimization services (SEO services) as they do into website design.
The reality is different. Use of small business SEO Services are highly underutilized. Most small business owners getting a web presence spend a lot of time on website design. But among thousands of sites that get launched, we see very few small business owners who start using search engine optimization services.
The reason is twofold-
Fatigue: Website design project is exhausting enough for most small business owners. Once they are done with it, most business owners want to see how the website helps them before starting off using SEO services.
Complexity: While website design can be difficult, SEO services are a lot more complex for small business owners to understand. So the idea is to get the site out there and see how the website performs without using any SEO services is even more appealing.
This approach to SEO services is self defeating. Without any search engine optimization, the only visitors to the site are those typing the domain name in. So the investment in website design is wasted for want of investment into SEO services.
At Small Biz Express, our website design packages come with some basic SEO services. We ensure that the pages have the right titles and tags to make the pages SEO friendly during the website design process. The basic SEO services offered as a part of website design packages also include submission to the top search engines.
Our regular SEO services are a lot more robust and are focused on getting our client’s pages in the top ranks of Google. And as a part of small business SEO services packages, we have now even launched a results based SEO package, where our compensation is tied to website showing up high on Google rankings.
Apart from Small Biz Express, there are many other providers of small business SEO services - business owners would do well to do a comparison and use the player that best meets their needs.
Tags: search engine optimization services, SEO services, small business SEO Services, website design, website design small business
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
August 25th, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
Only a third of small business owners have a website. It was this data that propelled us to start Small Biz Express focusing on inexpensive website design and online marketing. We spoke to several business owners and found that the barriers were
- No web education: Business owners thought that website design was all “techy”
- Expensive: Professional website design through a local agency can be expensive
As we launched, we expected most of our customers to be business owners without a web site. Surprise! Almost half our customers had attempted some sort of website design. Many of these sites did not look professional. So they ended up coming to us.
Players in the industry have attempted to make website design easy through templates and other tools. But there are a number of skills that one needs:
- Website Design skills: Even with templates, business owners try to change the color to meld with the logo or change the layout around. Website Design is “design”- there is art involved and web designers spend years learning it.
- Copy writing skills: Most business owners we know hate writing copy. We started our website design business trying to get business owners give us copy and soon realized that we would not launch anything if we waited for them to write the copy. Our standard website design process now involves an interview with owners for 20 minutes and have copywriters write the copy
- Technical skills: To use the internet for business, you need some tools that will make it useful for the
clients or even for yourself. For example, as a part of all the small business website design packages, Small Biz Express routinely offers an application called “Refer a friend” which will help customers refer your business to their friends and let you know so that you can thank the referees (verbally or in form of a discount). Our photographer website design packages offer the ability for photographers to post pictures (with watermarks) and enable customers to order them online. To make website design business centric with applications requires some technical skills.
As much as players are trying to push the “do it yourself” website design, most businesses are better off using professionals. At $25 per hour, Small Biz Express actually charges less for website design than what your local handyman does and we know there are others (free lancers mostly) who are as good and as cheap.
Here is a website of a restaurant in New York City - La Rural that we recently launched and I think it is apparent that having a professional design and develop a website makes a difference.
Tags: Small Biz Express, small business web design, Small business website design, small business website design company, web design, website design
Posted in Small Busines Website Design | No Comments »
August 3rd, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
I was told by my daughter that it was Friendship Day this Sunday. The United States Congress, in 1935, proclaimed the first Sunday of August as National Friendship Day. Go figure!
We’ve just got a pup (lovingly named Bruno) - the joy of our lives. With increasing realization that a dog is indeed a man’s best friend, I pushed our team to do something for dogs on National Friendship Day. The cat lovers at Small Biz Express of course took offence to the exclusion of cats. Cat lovers, for those of you who don’t know it, are pretty passionate people. To avoid a dogfight, we opened the promotion to all pets- even Goldfishes – who some people swear are people’s best friends!
We decided to give 50 percent off on web design and development for all pet related websites. We were planning to run the promotion only for one day since we are sure to lose money on this one. But Friendship Day is on a Sunday and we decided to also include Monday.
We decided to eat our own dog food and have just launched the promotion on Facebook and then on Twitter. We barely have any fans or followers at this stage but this allows us to start creating a presence.
It is safe at this stage- if we did this when we had a lot of followers, it would land us in a doghouse with investors. But social media marketing allows one to build the campaign slowly picking up learnings along the way. And we are glad to have started with Friendship day. Bruno approvingly says “Woof, Woof”. Happy friendship day, everyone.
Tags: Petcare websites, Small Biz Express, Web development offer, Website design offer
Posted in Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »
July 21st, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
Economic conditions have been brutal. Almost every small business and small business owner I know has been dealing with sales far lower than expected.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released their monthly survey this past Tuesday which showed some interesting results. The Actual Sales Changes,– which is the net percent of small business owners with higher sales minus small business owners with lower sales in the last three months compared to prior three months, is at -34%. This is the worst ever score since NFIB started doing this monthly survey since 1986.
So if you are a small business owner seeing a fall in sales and purchases you have a lot of company. As an online marketing company we get asked by small business owners on how we can help. Unfortunately there is no magic wand. Here is what some of what we’ve done.
There are four options:
- Lie low and tide it out: Don’t make dramatic changes. Keep up the good customer relationships you have always had and stick to the knitting. This shall pass. Look at low cost options that can help build the relationships further. Maybe this is the time to create that online newsletter you always wanted to. An e-mail newsletter to your customer is not expensive. Our end to end newsletter services which have been acclaimed by many small business owners include copyrighting and are available at amazingly low and affordable costs.
- Cut costs aggressively: Survival is the key. People are predicting an imminent turnaround of the economy. But timing a recovery is difficult and you need to first remain in business to take advantage of the predicted eventual recovery. We have looked at this aggressively in our company. The Internet has been very helpful in looking at deals for everything. In fact, we’ve done so much of it that we’ve decided to use our own research to create a new site called SmallBizExtras.com where we list all the savings we see- which brings us to the next point.
- Growing through new products and services: There are services that you can add on to the business at very low cost. You may be 90% there and then just need to add a few bells and whistles to get extra revenue. SmallBizExtras is a prime example. We are already scouring the internet very heavily looking for deals. Using internal resources and very little cost, we are creating a small business savings website - SmallBizExtras.com which will help other business owners and generate some revenues.
- Growing through new markets: While the market here in the US has been hit hard, elsewhere things are not as bad. There are markets like India and China that are growing, albeit more slowly. So if you can look at a low cost entry into these markets, this may be the time. Online marketing helps you offer your products across the globe. We’ve done the same launching SBXi.com as a site to offer our services in India.
So this is what we’ve done. We will lay no claim to spectacular success except that we are not giving up and doing something about dealing with the economy.
Tags: falling sales, online marketing, online marketing company, sales through online marketing, small business online, small business online marketing, small business sales
Posted in Small Business | 1 Comment »
July 2nd, 2009
By Vish Sastry Rachakonda
CEO of Small Biz Express
We are ready to formally launch Small Biz Express. Having spent a year and countless hours in beta, we are excited as a company about how our web services packages are shaping.
Use of internet by Americans is old news. While online transactions account for around 6% of the overall purchases, consumers use internet to research for buying products or services. Even for local services, 74% of customers say they look online before they make a decision on the provider.
Combine this around eighty percent penetration of internet in American households and one would assume that small businesses are using internet heavily to market themselves. Here comes the shocker- only 35% of businesses even have a website.
Even among those who have a website, more than half have not tried internet marketing. Many of these sites are just some information slapped on a webpage by friends or family.
In the endless chatter about Facebook and Twitter, it is easy to forget that basic work around use of internet by businesses remains largely incomplete. Business owners lack the skills to navigate online space and expertise in this area comes at a hefty price. Moreover what many of the web providers offer is some basic web design and development with little relevance to their business.
At Small Biz Express, we spend the last one year in understanding the market. We feel the only way to help small business owners are to create services that are relevant to their business today. To that end, we are focusing on specific industry segments, understanding their core needs and creating website design, development and application packages that meet their needs at a value price.
In addition, we are rolling out broad online marketing packages that will help business owners get more business.
Our vision is to be the online arm of business owners helping them win online. Our success in the success of our customers and we look forward to helping entrepreneurs win their quest for independence and success.
Tags: online marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Small Biz Website, small business website, website design
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
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