These days, building a website or an e-shop is easy, whatever the result looks like in terms of design and structure. It is easy because the tools for building one no longer require you to know how to code.
With very little coding knowledge, plus some nice images and text, anyone can create an e-shop or a website today.
There are also templates, which can make up for a developer’s weak spots and give a good-looking result in a short time (a week, for example).
Are websites built with ready-made templates and page builders any good?
The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no. If you want to cut production time and cost, a website or an e-shop built on a ready-made template for WordPress can be a very good solution. It can work very well for someone on a tight budget who cannot spend 6 or 7 thousand euros on a custom website. Of course, we are not talking about 300-euro websites, since with such a small amount the result you get is bottom of the range.
If the developer knows how to optimise a ready-made template and how to work with its code, so that only what is needed is displayed and no resources are wasted, then it is a very good solution.
In this approach, choosing the right template is extremely important, and so is “working on” the code and using the right plugins, and only a few of them.
A ready-made WordPress template will always fall short on performance compared with a properly built custom template or website. That assumes, of course, that the custom site is built properly, which in many cases cannot be taken for granted.
Finally, there are always hybrid solutions, such as building the header and footer of a site as custom code and using a page builder to design the inner layout. In our view this is the best option: if the client’s budget allows it, they essentially get a custom site that they can manage with the page builder.
What do we do after the website or e-shop is built?
The first and most basic thing to understand, even before building a website, is that any site or e-shop is the place where we want a potential customer to come and find out more about us. It is where they will complete their purchase, get in touch with us or give us their email address.
For a potential customer to reach that point and complete a lead, as we call it (in other words an action), they need to find a way to our website. Generally, that way in is advertising the website or online shop.
By advertising we mean the following ways for a potential customer to find our website.
- Advertising on social media such as Facebook and Instagram so that customers get to know us
- Advertising on shopping search engines such as Skroutz (Greece’s largest price comparison site)
- Promoting our website on search engines (SEO)
- Email Marketing Campaigns
- Advertising through printed material or on vehicles
- Advertising on Google Ads
- Advertising on video platforms such as YouTube
- Affiliate advertising
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What is the best advertising for my site?
Put very simply, the best advertising for you and your website is the advertising that brings results and profit to the business. Or, to be even more precise, the best advertising reaches the largest possible targeted audience at the lowest possible cost and brings the highest possible profit to your business. By profit we mean whatever you gain from your advertising, and money is only one part of that.
Every business needs a different advertising plan. That is because each business makes different products, aimed at different audiences. Even businesses selling the same type of product may need a different advertising approach, because their prices can differ a lot.
How much does advertising my website cost?
This is the question our clients ask us most often. And we come back with the most accurate answer there is: what is your budget, and what are your goals?
Depending on each client’s budget, we can look at their advertising options. To set a floor, we would say that, apart from a few exceptions for local sites in areas and sectors without much competition, the minimum you should set aside for advertising is 300–400 euros.
Of course, everything depends on the competition. If your competitors spend 2,000 euros a month and you spend 300, they have a better chance of success (assuming both of you know how to advertise properly).
What is remarketing?
We will devote a whole article to remarketing, but because it is a must-have type of advertising, every website should be doing it.
Put simply, remarketing means showing ads to people who have visited your website, so that later on they buy from your online shop or get in touch with you.
Only 3% of users who see an ad will buy today. The rest will buy at some future date and will be part of that day’s 3%. With remarketing we increase the chances that they choose our business, because it will be easy for them to reach and it will also be familiar, since they keep seeing it.
What else should I do besides advertising?
Besides advertising, a website needs to be updated regularly with new content, so that it keeps up with developments and holds users’ interest. That content can be added as new products or services, or as articles on the website’s blog.
An important part of a website‘s success is being active on social media and using them well to communicate. A website is linked to social media because we can send traffic to it through them, and also because they play an important role in promoting your website (SEO), as they are a factor that Google takes into account. Find out more about the importance of social media for your website’s Google ranking here.
One more thing to watch once our web project is finished is how users behave on the site. We can do this with tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Hotjar, and so understand what we need to change in the structure of the website to make it easier to use and more popular with users. This way we can see which pages users visited and how many, and also what they did on each one.
Finally, something we must not forget is that we should keep working to improve the speed of our website, as users expect more and more.
Keep developing and working on your website for success online!
To build a successful online presence, the answer is to keep developing your whole online presence, whether by adding content and optimising your site / e-shop or, if needed, by rebuilding all or part of it. If you do all of the above, success online will not be long in coming because, simple as all this sounds, very few businesses and companies actually do it.
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