Up to Scratch Websites

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups have emerged as serious contenders to established corporate entities in recent years. This trend has taken the fast lane with the availability of many digital tools in enhancing how small businesses do their work. For instance, solutions such as CRMs and ERPs were once exclusively available and affordable to big firms. With the rise of scalable and affordable cloud services, however, these are becoming easier to use and available even to start-ups.

Yet the most significant tool that has proved vital in the success of SMEs is the website. Inexpensive to build, easy to deploy and instantly accessible to the customer, the website is a key ingredient in ensuring an adequate online presence. Today, simply having a website isn’t enough; it must be well-maintained, highly-available and user-friendly, with the right content for customers. Here are some tips to achieve the right platform.

Scalability

Is the company web hosting efficient and scalable? Is the price right price or is it comparably expensive? This applies to cloud-based hosting as well. Typically, SMEs often end up paying higher than they should, due to a lack of scalability. The right web hosting service should be flexible enough so that payment is based on traffic levels.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Is there an effective backup system in place? Maintaining a website comes with its risks; it is open to attacks, can suffer server downtime or run into unprecedented problems which can temporarily bring down the website. Every time a customer is unable to access the website, there is a risk. To ensure business continuity, implement a capable site failover system, which switches to a secondary server at the event of downtime, thereby reducing the risk of total downtime.

Regulatory Compliance

If the website interacts with the customers, whether through sales or by crowdsourcing feedback, it is essentially dealing in user data which is a sensitive commodity these days. Different industry standards apply to the processing and storage of user data, and being familiar with the relevant regulatory frameworks which apply is critical.

Conclusion

2016 is the year of the small businesses. SMEs are in a unique position to make it big. The key to success, of course, is that they must play their cards right and leverage the available tools to optimise business infrastructure. Optimising the business website for growth and availability is a good starting point.

Is your website performing to optimise business opportunity?

Adapted from an article on smallbusiness.co.uk