Websites have become a critical component of business development and particularly marketing. Your website is probably the first place people go to when they want to learn about your products or services. With a range of options currently available, from do-it-yourself self-starter websites to custom designed and developed website solutions, what’s best for your business and budget?

For most medium and small businesses, marketing was pretty simple just 10 or 20 years ago. They’d buy an ad in the yellow pages, maybe run a few newspaper ads, send out a direct mail piece to their regular customers, and that would be it. Advertising with mass media like TV, radio, magazines and billboards was often too expensive, although a billboard might be considered if the business sold a product and the board was nearby.

Bulk email development and distribution can be overwhelming and frustrating. One common challenge is keeping an email’s design intact and consistent across all email clients (e.g., Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.). This issue arises because email clients, unlike web browsers, operate completely at the discretion of the application developer, which causes disparities from one email client to another. Outlook, for example, uses a word processor rendering engine instead of a browser. As a result, an email may look great in Gmail but fall apart in Outlook. Go-to email service providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact have not even been able to account for this across the board.  

You go to the time and effort to put up a website. You make sure it’s designed using best practices and written to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO). But how do you know if anyone is actually visiting it, and if so, how long are they staying? That’s where Google Analytics comes in.