Often, choosing software is one of the first things new business owners do when they decide to make a website. As you’ve learned from this series though, you’ll know that you should really start with researching your business’s goals and your customer’s goals.

Once you have this information, you’ll have a much better idea of what features and benefits you need in the software you choose.

Generally speaking, your website needs are going to fall into these categories:

1. Your customers want to find your location or call you or send you an email. They may want to read some information about your company, but you’re not selling your products online.  If this is your company, than you may just need a basic brochure-style website that doesn’t change often, but does appear in local searches. Software for these sites that I recommend include:

• Expression Web — If you live south of Oklahoma City, you can learn to use this program in my web design classes at Mid-America Technology Center
• Wordpress — This software is usually thought of a as a blogging platform. But you can use it to easily build and maintain a small site.

2. Your customers are looking for information about your industry and product. You’ll need to update the site frequently and give visitors ways to easily access previous articles. In this situation, I recommend software that lives on your hosting account, so you can access it anywhere. The product I recommend is:

• Wordpress — As I said before, this software is usually thought of as a blogging platform. If you’ve seen blog written using Wordpress, you may not want to use it for your site, thinking that you’re site will have to look like someone’s teenager’s angsty blog. But this isn’t true any more. You can setup completely respectable business websites that look nothing like your typical blog.For example:
  • Product Sellers Talk Radio
  • Watersweb Solutions

3. Your customers are wanting to purchase your products online through an automated shopping cart system. If this is the case, you’ll need shopping cart software, a Paypal account and/or a merchant account, and a system for receiving and shipping out orders. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to just recommend some shopping cart solutions for your consideration:

• Shop Kit Plus — The Shop Kit Plus is an excellent solution for the small business owner who is either new to the Internet or doesn’t want to learn HTML. Not only can you add your products and categories easily, but you can also manager your site’s pages from within the admin area. You can also use just about any template design to give your site the look and feel you want it to have.
• CubeCart — This product is more complex than the SKP, but it has a ton of features. Once you get over the learning curve, you’ll discover that it’s very powerful and can handle even the busiest sites.
• WAHMcart — The Shop Kit Plus is geared towards physical products specifically. Cubecart can handle digital products, but doesn’t allow you to take advantage of many online marketing techniques. WAHMcart, includes many internet marketing features built right in, such as several mailing lists. The downside is that you’ll need to build your own website to use WAHMcart, but the plus side is that you can manage your website with either Wordpress or Shop Kit Plus.

Generally speaking, your website should fit into one of these categories. If not, I’d love to hear from you. Just comment below.

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