Choosing the Right Solution for your Business Website

Considerations and decisions

The first thing to consider is the main purpose of your website. Is it meant to attract more customers to your business, do you want to sell products online, or something else? Another important consideration is your budget. Some technologies are inherently inexpensive to implement and operate, while others are more expensive to build and run. You might also decide to take on as much of the work yourself to reduce costs, as opposed to hiring a complete development team for a full year. Another consideration that is often overlooked, is how much time per week you want to spend working on your website. For some businesses it may be enough to just create an online presence and spend the rest of the year focussing on their actual business. Others might expect to operate their online store full-time or even with a team of full-time employees.

Keep it simple

The majority of businesses would already benefit greatly from just having a basic professional online presence. Examples are freelancers, restaurants, construction companies and other services providers. Initially, the introduction of your company, showcasing your work and listing the prices of your services can be more than sufficient to increase your business potential. Even small businesses that sell products or book appointments with clients do not immediately need to integrate e-commerce or booking capabilities into their own website. Examples are beauty and hair salons, vacation rentals, coaches, art galleries and creative workshops. There are many convenient external platforms and plugins that you can conveniently connect to your websites. Furthermore, if you sell customized, high ticket or specialized items, most customers will probably prefer to visit your physical store anyway to experience your product first-hand before buying. Consider ring shopping for example. When buying a ring for a special occasion, trying out rings in real-life is part of the experience. It also provides information about the weight, personal fit and the shimmer in natural light. These are all characteristics of the product that are difficult to convey online. The possibilities are endless in the digital word, so be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Start with the essentials. You can always add more functionality later.

Start selling online

However, it does not hurt to plan ahead. If you already know that you will require e-commerce functionality right away or in the near future, there are several options to consider. Vamudo recommends and supports two popular solutions and also supports a third, highly customizable and scalable solution. One solution would be to have a corporate website with possibly a blog and other pages on your main domain, and a separate Shopify webshop running on a subdomain, like shop.your-domain.com. Another solution is to run both your corporate website and webshop on a single WordPress installation. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. With WordPress you would typically choose to take responsibility of hosting the website yourself, or host it via Vamudo, while Shopify offers highly optimized hosting for their product on its own cloud infrastructure. Shopify may turn out to be more expensive with the fee structures they apply, while WooCommerce for WordPress only requires a subscription to your payment service provider of choice. Each solution has its own plugin and theme ecosystem and you may feel more comfortable with one or the other. There are many more things to consider when choosing between Shopify and WordPress when you need e-commerce functionality. You will be able to read more about it in a future blog post. The third e-commerce solution provided by Vamudo is Sylius. It is the best choice for e-commerce at scale that requires many customizations and API connections to services regarding warehouse management, customer service, shipping and business intelligence. It is not the cheapest solution to implement and the content management system is a bit more technical than what WordPress provides. But, it has all the capabilities to take your e-commerce business worldwide. Vamudo’s founder Jesse van Muijden has facilitated a multi-million e-commerce operation running on Sylius for several years. He is still in close contact with his former team mates, so Vamudo can quickly assemble a crew of Sylius experts to take your e-commerce business global.

Harnessing the power of Hugo

A webshop can become very time consuming and costly to build, run and maintain. It often happens that clients get too excited about all the opportunities of the web, but neglect their webshop once delivered, or even forget to write a blog post now and then. This is money down the drain and you will end up with an incomplete looking website. Vamudo aims to provide you the best possible value that fits your needs and capacity. Based on previous experience and market research, Vamudo recommends single page business card websites and multi-page corporate websites for most clients. Vamudo creates these websites using Hugo. Hugo is a so-called static site generator that gained immense popularity among software engineers. It is mostly used to quickly create websites for technical documentation or technical blogs. Hugo has a very limited ecosystem for themes, because it is commonly used to just quickly share technical information on the web. However, Vamudo developed its own styling framework on top of Hugo to make Hugo websites look absolutely stunning. A core strength of Hugo is that every time you change the content of the websites, it rebuilds your site as a collection of static webpages. Unlike WordPress, which must connect to a database to figure out how to render a page, a webpage generated by Hugo is, in principle, loaded as quickly as opening any file on your own computer. So, how can the content of the website be updated if there is no database? Instead of a regular database, all your content and configuration is stored on a filesystem. It is similar to the directories and files on your computer. The difference is that the filesystem is versioned with a technology called git. Your content will be stored securely in the cloud. You can edit your content visually on a special protected section of your website using DecapCMS, a simple yet feature rich content management system. It creates a new version of all your website’s data in git, everytime you update something in the content management dashboard. Automated processing pipelines configured by Vamudo will directly generate and publish a new version of your website everytime a new version of your content is pushed to git by the content management system.

Benefits of statically generated websites

This approach to building websites has great benefits worth noting. Statically generated websites are very inexpensive to host and consistently load at lightning fast speed. Static webpages are impossible to hack. Hackers cannot do anything else but download the webpage. There is no database, like WordPress does require. This obliterates a major vulnerabilty for hackers to exploit, but it also relieves the burden of database maintenance and back-ups. The beauty of git is that it is a distributed versioned control system, which means that you can easily and regularly clone your content, including the version history, to as many other cloud based git providers and physical devices as you want. This makes your website highly resilient to any form of disaster that might occur. For instance, when all database back-ups are lost in a fire in a datacenter, you can just restore a clone of your data that was stored on your own device or another datacenter, and continue working on your website.

Cost management

Even the most simplistic website can turn out more expensive than you budgeted. That has to do with the many different aspects of developing a beautiful website. First, your corporate identity: the logo, the colors, the fonts and the tone of voice on your website. Second, the text on your website does not magically appear. Someone has to write it. If your website has multiple languages, the copywriting effort gets multiplied by the number of language. Moreover, the text on your website must be written in a specific way to make your website rank high in the results of search engines. This is called search engine optimization, or SEO in short. Third, you need appealing images to make your website look the part. You may need to schedule a photography session to achieve a picture perfect presentation of your business and your team. If your image sizes are not optimized for the web, your website might still be slow even on the fastest infrastucture. You might also disappoint your visitors by draining their cellular data with large media files. Finally, you may desire custom designs and layouts, which can also require significant effort compared to using an existing template. Fortunately, there is good news and there is good news. The good news is that Vamudo has direct access to specialists in all fields of web development that can help you with your corporate identity, copywriting, translations, SEO, photography, image optimization and design customization. The other good news is that Vamudo will build your website with you. After all, you will be running the website when it is done. So, you are cordially invited to do as much of the work yourself to keep costs to a minimum.

Conclusion

To conclude, there is a lot to consider when creating a website for your business. Vamudo will carefully guide you through the process to help you choose the best approach for your situation. Vamudo will not try to upsell bells and whistles you are not going to need, but rather work with you to achieve the best results for the best possible price. Most businesses will probably benefit the most from Vamudo’s low-cost, highly optimized Hugo websites. However, if you want to go all out and conquer the world with an enterprise grade world-wide e-commerce solution, Vamudo will be ready and able to make your digital dreams come to life.