For small business owners, crises are part of the experience of debuting a product or service, opening a storefront, marketing to an influential audience and dealing with the unexpected.
It this chaos of existence, fielding queries from consumers, crafting the right message and broadcasting an effective reply, that constitutes the essence of business communications. Indeed, everything a small business owner faces – every challenge an entrepreneur must overcome – is, in whole or part, an element of communications.
Nowhere is that point more relevant than in the creation of web solutions, which can either distinguish a brand from the competition or dilute or destroy its personality.
In the realm of the Internet, where communications has multiple manifestations, from the brevity of Twitter to the long-form writing of blogs and Facebook posts, in this amplified arena of noise there is a discernible signal: Proof that you, starting with your website, can elicit the attention of the individuals you plan to contact.
Achieving this goal is one thing; accomplishing it in an affordable manner – without compromising quality, or encountering delays –is something else, entirely. The good news is that this union between design, development, optimization and promotions, all of it overseen by a specialized team of experts, is now a reality. Welcome, in other words, to the world of plug-and-play communications.
I write this statement from experience, where, in my role as Co-Founder of Workshop55, we enable small business owners to conveniently (in four easy steps) convert chaos into order. Thus begins the process of intelligent communications, with an online presence that resonates with the right audience, for the right reasons.
I raise these points because, having seen innovative ideas dissolve into nothingness and budgets vanquish businesses; as a witness to the many ways companies can collapse, and aware of the most common way businesses crumble, there is, in fact, a solution to this problem.
That answer, which involves the consolidation of web design, coding, hosting, search engine optimization, online promotions, regular updates and continuous customer support, is the ideal marriage between technology, talent and communications.
It is this careful selection of freelance professionals, screened, certified and assembled for specific projects, that guarantees the timely completion of tasks and the seamless operation of this most critical component of online communications. For, if a generic template takes precedence over a finely patterned web page, and if boring copy pushes aside poetic prose, mediocrity will predominate, period.
Quality and Affordability: Coequal Factors, Not Mutually Exclusive Benefits
The takeaway theme for all executives is that quality and affordability are not – and should never be – mutually exclusive. If anything, the “democratization of technology,” the instantaneous connection between vendors and prospective clients throughout the world, makes services less expensive, not more onerous.
There are so many gifted programmers, designers, branding experts and communications consultants that diversity of choice is greater than previously imaginable.
But the paradox is that few, if any, small business owners have the time to identify, interview, request and review proposals from, say, a developer in New York City, a designer in Hong Kong and a social media adviser in Australia.
Access to these professionals through one site, where control is easy, is the very purpose of transforming this grand bazaar – picture a crowded marketplace, a destination for merchants of every trade and bidding by individuals of every language – into a manageable and practical resource.
Small business owners must, therefore, rid themselves of the misconception that quality is too expensive, while that which is affordable is not worthy of classification as top quality.
That perception about this conflict is from an analog era, a period of limited information and localized choices. That chapter is over, a footnote in the progress of global finance, broadband, search, data mining and the liberation of talent in general.
With these strengths, executives and entrepreneurs – on behalf of all companies, in all industries – can flourish. The time of tradeoffs is over.
Vasily Kamyshanov is the Co-Founder of Workshop55.com, which enables small business owners to conveniently have a strong and customized online presence. A veteran digital maketer for a variety of global brands, Vasily works with entrepreneurs across a diverse spectrum of interests.