It happens more often than one would have imagined.  A prospect or friend who knows what our agency does will tell me that they either need a redesign of their old website or even develop their company’s first website.   And can we help them?   

While the answer is unequivocally yes – we CAN help, what has really happened is the opening of a dialog on their entire marketing effort.   This is frequently much more than the prospect or friend has bargained for.  Yet we feel we are doing a disservice to anyone by simply nodding and saying ‘Sure we’ll do a website for you’, without knowing much (or enough) about their business, its focus and challenges.   

Keep in mind that in order for our agency to do a really good job on a website, a substantial amount of intelligence has to be gained in order to understand the objective and create an interesting, cool, and highly intuitive website.   Smaller businesses frequently have more budget restrictions than larger ones and that’s no surprise.  But whether the business is small or large, having a website is important but it may not be the most important marketing activity their business needs to move forward.  

Our digital and direct marketing agency is not looking to compete with the GoDaddy.com website model.    If inexpensive is what the mission is, then sites like GoDaddy (there are others) can provide template solutions that enable the user to plug in content (photos, text, links) and get a web presence all with hosting for $ 1,000 or less.   True you will not benefit from our agency’s (or any agency’s) years of experience in usability and creative design, but if spending as little money as possible is needed, then do the work yourself and you will have a web ‘presence’. 

What those template solutions will also not do is ask you questions about the business and its direction.   We have had clients ask us about creating a new website and ended up not only doing that and we end up helping their business market its services in many other ways.   Other times we may not revamp the website as a primary strategy. 

One of our team members likened an inquiry about a new website is often a marketing cry for help.   I think that is true in many cases.  What we can uncover during our discovery process in developing a new or updating and old website is at times surprising to everyone – client and agency.   Once we get to that point the real work can begin and what results is a better engagement and better result for the client. 

We’re in business to give our clients all that they ask for and more.  Sometimes that can be more than they want or even need.  But the questions always have to be asked to determine what we feel is the best marketing path for the client.  It might be a new website and then again it might not. 

Do you think I am off base here?