Is your Web site an investment, or an expense?

Here’s the distinction: an expense is something you pay for, and then you own it – but it doesn’t provide any real value once you’ve bought it, and in fact it may easily lose value as time goes on. A good example of this is a new car.

An investment, conversely, is an asset that you spend some money on in order to obtain, and then it delivers a return. Hopefully it returns at least the amount of money you laid out in the first place, and ideally it returns much much more than that. Think stock market and rental properties. How much of a return (in terms of dollars, not percentage) usually correlates to how much you put into it to begin with.

We’re all familiar with this concept. So, how does it apply to your Web site?

Unlike the cut-and-dried examples above, a Web site can be either an investment or an expense. It all comes down to one simple question: does your site make money for you? Savvy business owners know that their money should work for them, not the other way around.

At MWD Web, we see too many sites that fall into the expense category. Small or non-existent calls to action, a lack of a clear selling proposition, no means of generating a following by email or social media – these things and more all add up to a site that doesn’t generate sales.

We argue that if you spend money on a site, it should provide a return. All our paperwork refers to ‘investment,’ not ‘price,’ for this reason. We start with the mindset that your site will throw off revenue for you, and we carry that through all the way to execution and follow-up.

Take a good hard look at your site, and see if it’s behaving like an investment or an expense. If an expense, it’s time to do something about it!

If you don’t have a site yet, we encourage you to approach it from the investment angle. Realize that spending the cash to get it done right in the first place is going to yield more fruit more quickly than a poorly done site with no real strategy to it.

After all, you wouldn’t buy a shiny new Ferrari that didn’t have an engine, would you?

Image by Tom Wolf