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.