10 Reasons Why Your Business Should Have a Website

Should your business have a website? Even if your business is small and sells products or services you don't think can be sold online? The simple answer is YES. If you have a business you should have a website.

Don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays, there's very little that can't be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas.
If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online. You should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer. That said it's not enough that you just have a website, you must have a professional looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colour-blind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

Still not sure here are 10 reasons why you should get on the web:

1. New economy.
Internet has created a new economy, which by its explosive growth and sheer size already changed our perception of traditional way of doing business. Companies like Amazon and eBay have successfully created domination on areas, where just few years ago traditional brick-and-mortar companies were kings. However, in order to be successful on the net, you don’t have to be a giant like them, many small and mid-size companies managed to build online businesses quite profitably. In fact, studies show small and mid-size companies will be the main growth force of e-commerce in coming years.

2. Internet is a perfect venue for business.
In order to make a sale you need visitors to come to your shop. On the Internet, your shop could be only a click away from your prospective customers, with proper marketing your Internet storefront can have more buyers than you ever can get in a brick and mortar shop.

3. Company’s image.
Whether you sell products or services online or not, in today’s world you have to have a corporate presence on the Internet, otherwise; as you must have noticed that people simply don’t take your business seriously if you tell them that your company does not have a website. A nice corporate site definitely increases the image of a company especially if it has great product or service related content to go with.

4. Provide better customer support.
Customer accusation and retention is one of the key factors of business value chain. Thanks to Internet technology, business's can provide customer support more effectively, this means better customer satisfaction and increase of profitability.

5. Make information more easily available to customers.
Just a couple of years ago, companies used to require days to deliver products or services update information to their customers. Things have changed since then, today you can add or make any changes to your company and product related content virtually in a matter of couple of hours, publish on your site and share with the whole world.

6. Cut costs.
New technologies allow you to take virtually any part of your business online, that include supply chain management, billing, shipping, procurement etc. Streamlining these business processes through online systems will allow companies to cut costs significantly in almost every sphere of any business. For example; companies can reduce more than five percents of their maintenance, repair and operation costs by adopting e-business solutions. This five percent savings can turn into 50% of a company’s net profit!

7. Ability to do business 24 hours.
How else you can continue making sales, while your staff are sleeping! The biggest advantages of online shops are that they are open 24 hours a day year round. Thanks to Internet off time, when your shop is generally closed, sales in some cases can be more than your regular business hours!

8. Low start up costs.
Building a web site does not require big investments, there are many low cost tools available today, which can help you create sites from very scratch. Many business portals allow you to build web sites from templates. For less than £50 per month you can have a full-fledged corporate e-business site with all e-commerce features!

9. You physical presence could be in any location.
The World Wide Web allows you to do business from any part of the world. Your physical location, except for few cases is not that important since you conduct your business online.

10. Go global.
Thanks to Internet you can instantly become a global player. In fact, you don’t have to invest large sums of money to do this, there are literally hundreds of vertical and horizontal e-marketplaces available on the net. These marketplaces allow you for a nominal fee to get access to a large audience of prospective customers from all over the world. According to AMR Research more than $1.3trillion of goods and services will flow through the B2B marketplaces, who does not want a piece of this pie?
The right determinant of e-business success is the same like any off line business,you have to have a great idea, you have to have a business plan, there should be a value proposition for prospective clients and you should have belief in it and your ability.
Getting online is becoming cheaper and easier thanks to emergence of new technologies but marketing on the Internet is becoming more expensive.

Take your business online now, before the marketing costs become way too expensive for small companies.

Hackers Attack WordPress Sites

Recently we've been reading reports and receiving emails about a global attack WordPress Installations with every known web host, to crack open to crack open accounts and inject malicious scripts.

90,000 Blogs have also been hit so far check out this blog on Mashable.

Today, this attack is happening at a global level and wordpress instances across hosting providers are being targeted. In a detailed analysis of the attack pattern it was found out that most of the attack was originating from CMSs (mostly wordpress) It also revealed that the “admin” accounts had been compromised (in one form or the other) and malicious scripts were uploaded into the directories.

To ensure that your websites are secure and safeguarded from this attack, we recommend the following steps:

1. Update and upgrade your WordPress installation and all installed plugins
2. Install the security plugin listed here
3. Ensure that your admin password is secure and preferably randomly generated
4. Other ways of Hardening a WordPress installation are shared at http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

We Highly recommend that you contact your web host provider for there tips to protect your WordPress website.

PhaTStuff Designs

PhaTStuff Video

We been meaning to post this for a while now. Our  new video from myvideoshorts.com
After spotting a tweet they posted saying Like there Facebook and out of the new Likes they receive they will choose a someone at random for a free video and luckily it was us. They customer is second to none, after a few emails conversations, I put together a few images,Testimonial, website and Social Media links and emailed the files to them, A week and half later we received an email with the link to the video for private viewing, after It was given our approval, myvideosshorts.com made it public on YouTube via there channel.

If you need a video to advertise your business then I highly recommend these guys.

 Here is there video.

Give there YouTube channel a look. https://www.youtube.com/myvideoshorts

More for your Money

I was asked to source a web design company to build a web site for a friends new business, whilst researching company's I noticed that might friend had two choice either spend most of his budget and get a high quality professional website or spend less and have a less quality not very professional looking website. I didn't want my friend to do either so I decided to build one for him, that's how PhaTStuff Designs was born.
 I wanted people who had a small business or just wanted a website to promote themselves, a professional looking website without blowing there entire budget. I also decided to incorporate other skills I have learnt into my site by adding a graphic design and enable us to offer, Logo, Brochure, Business Card, Flyer,Leaflets and Poster designs to our services. you can now get everything you need for your business on one website, with the knowledge you will get quality professional results without needing a bank busting budget. Business has been tough and there's a lot of competition out there, but I hope with a bit of luck, hard work and professional designs that PhaTStuff Designs will become successful.

Here are couple of our clients who recently had Logo's designed by us.

CKL Office Solutions. A Celebration Logo celebrating 15 years in business to go on there 2013 Catalogue.



 













Oakland Xtreme Sports and new extreme sports clothing company that will be launching very soon.











For more information check out our website www.phatstuff-designs.co.uk