Why you need a website

The webopedia tells you why you need a website . . .

Nowadays a website and a url (Universal Resource Locater - the address of a website eg., www.naren.8m.com) is to many the same as having a visiting card or customized office stationary.

The Internet gives us the unique opportunity to communicate instantly without thought to geographical boundaries. But how do you take advantage of this opportunity?It isn’t as tough or as easy as you might think. All it requires is an understanding of what the web can and cannot do for you and what you can make the web do for you.

• Communications are very fast. Any customer looking for information about your company, products or prices can get it instantly from your website. Without having to write or call for information.
• It doesn’t cost a lot. Once you put up all the relevant information on your website, it doesn’t cost you anything extra for every visitor who visits the site and views the information. Now compare the costs involved with printing and mailing four page brochures to ten thousand addresses over a period of one year to the cost involved in having those four pages on the website for one year.
• Information can always be up to date. If you update the website regularly, the visitor can always get the latest information. This capability assumes vast significance if your product range and prices change frequently. With a printed brochure or catalogue, makeing such changes on a regular basis adds up to a whole lot of time and money. A website can be updated in minutes for a nominal cost and you can do it as many times as you wish.
• Unique and cheaper email. Enjoy the aura of professionalism generated by email addresses like yourname@yourcompany.com. A website allows you to set up multiple email ids such as
• help@xyz.com
• support@xyz.com
• reservation@xyz.com
• anythingelse@xyz.com

You no longer have to work with ISP dependent email addresses like yourname@vsnl.com, so now you have the freedom to choose the best ISP package. Website mail is also much faster than web based mail systems like Hotmail or Rocketmail. Connect your Offices. If you have branches in other cities and need to exchange data in large files, like MS Access Databases or MS Excel Spreadsheets, you can use your website to exchange this data through FTP (File Transfer Protocol) This part of your site can be password protected and thus unavailable to general visitors to your site. Your partners and customers abroad will expect you to have a website. A website has become one of the basic requirements for business all over the world. Having a good website will definitely give you an edge over your competitiors. Your neighbour has a website.

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Originally published on naren.8m.com, my first website, in 1999; recovered from the Wayback Machine.