Alex, It's 2011. For less than thousand dollars any company can have an updated looking website - mostly based on wordpress. The website is your door to commerce. "Company websites, not social media, top source of new leads." http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2011/09/company-websites-not-social-media-to... I'm not saying you need bells and whistles, but it does need to be clean, neat and relevant. Would you shop in a run down, dirty store? - Peter On 9/30/2011 9:58 AM, Alex Balashov wrote:
On 09/30/2011 09:47 AM, Robert Johnson wrote:
Thanks for the on and offlist responses. I'm giving Alcazar a try. Despite the appearance of their website, their service seems to work quite well so far. Hopefully it continues to do so.
This may seem self-serving given the appearance of our web site, but I've found that some of the best companies in this industry lack the core competency or inclination to have a great web site. But they write good copy; bad copy is highly correlated with fly-by-nights.
Those of you who do any kind of retail or mass-market product marketing may rightly disagree. But I think the cost-benefit isn't there to spend a lot of money and time on a cutting-edge web site for those selling extremely niche B2B products to a very small audience. The people who know exactly what they want will find them anyway, probably by other channels, and the vendors don't have massive funnels of eyeballs for which to optimise
The best example I can think of in the lack of correlation between web site polish and quality is the case of Fred Goldstein - www.ionary.com. The site is plain, straightforward and informative, but it is not web 2.0, it doesn't have AJAXian bells and whistles, and there is no danger of CSS3 or HTML5 lurking nearby. Yet Fred needs no introduction, and is widely recognised to be one of the premier experts in this industry on all matters ILEC interconnection, PSTN regulatory, etc, etc.
I think that often goes for other types of vendors, as well. Alcazar has a total addressable market of maybe a few thousand companies in the US at best. I don't think it makes any sense for them to spend a lot of time on a sexy, fetching web site, as long as the information is there.