SPIDERbytes

It’s free! It’s easy!   Who needs a web site, when you can do it all yourself without paying anyone?

Twitter is free. MySpace is free. Linked is Free. And, there are several online sources where you can pen your own blog.  None of them require development or graphic knowledge and all are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives.

We communicate, pontificate and socialize.. We post and point.. We consume and wait and we produce and hope.  All for free.

This is the new world for many of today’s “web marketers” taking advantage of an overflow of web opportunities, where you can easily mark your own territory, customize the material for your brand, connect to a virtually limitless audience, and market yourself, your products and your message. None of these requires paid professionals to build the code or customize the graphics. They simply require time and a message.

Web Site’s, on the other hand, really do require professional assistance, whether that’s from internal staff or paid contractors. Sure, there are many web based tools and services that claim to offer companies the ability to easily customize their web presence. For all but a few companies, however, with limited content and functionality needs, and owners who have resident computer graphic skills, these tools quickly become dissatisfying. Professionals are sought shortly after.

But, with the advent of a broad mix of web marketing tools, perhaps the time for a company web site has come and gone. Perhaps, the idea of a central online presence for your company (or product, or stakeholder audience) is no longer relevant. If, after all, the same forms of communication can occur through these evolving web tools, perhaps the web site is no longer useful, or at best, simply creates a redundant form of communication that the free tools all have covered.

It is very clear the online landscape is changing at a rapid pace, and the ability to predict which tools will dominate in a year even is difficult at best. But one thing is beyond crystal clear, web sites, having made their functional and productive introduction to the business world in 1996, remain the mainstay for every business and will for the foreseeable future.

Web sites are the hub of an online wheel that is spinning and expanding rapidly. The hub remains central to all them, acting as a focal point for all the other lines of online communication out there now and those not yet invented.

With few exceptions, no social media service today offers organizations the ability to completely customize an environment and build mechanisms for communicating with all your stakeholders. Without exception, all the web marketing options provide effective means of communicating with select audiences, with the essential tactic of pulling them into your web site. Think of the power of Twitter, where you send out micro-announcements and musings, with the ability to draw those interested into another location. Think of email communication and the obvious goal of creating a “call-to-action” for the reader to click on a link, presumably to your web site. Consider blogs, and Linked In, and My Space pages, all of which will focus on specific aspects of your business, but ultimately encourage the reader to “visit our web site” for more information, to purchase, or to learn more about your company.

Today’s social media environment, which I humbly predict will be tomorrow’s social media environment for many more tomorrow’s, all are elements of a large wheel of online media outlets for company’s to use to communicate with their target audiences.  Our target markets are rarely in the same place at the same time, so utilizing the array of web marketing tools is critical to getting the greatest amount of targeted exposure.

Ultimately, however, our common goals are our prospects and other stakeholders into the hub of this wheel, into our web site. Free tools and cheap services notwithstanding, your web site needs to represent you with the highest standards possible, in ways and with functionality that can not be accomplished through any of the alternative marketing tools.

Web marketing tools offer you the ability to find and communicate with your audience “wherever they are.” Using these tools wisely requires that you draw them into your web site.