If you talk to most web design companies they will tell you that every business should be online. As far as I’m concerned, that simply isn’t true. There are many instances where a web presence will not benefit an individual or company and paying for a website is false economy.

On the other hand, if you are in a niche market, having a website can drastically change your business. In this brief post I’m going to concentrate on a real life case study.

Around 2 years ago we were contacted by Alan, a chimney sweep based in the same town as us with regards to the development of a simple website that would inform visitors about his services and allow interested parties to contact him and make bookings.

Within the first 6 months he had been asked numerous times about who developed his website from other industry members around the country. 

After our initial meeting it was evident that the business had a range of additional services that Alan offered, and to omit those from the website would be remiss. So, after our brief discussion it was decided to include this additional information into the site at the time of development to not only reduce the ongoing cost, but to also offer the search engines additional and relevant content to help in future rankings.

The site was pretty straightforward, and the content was agreed upon pretty quickly, tweaked for SEO and end user relevance and the site was launched. So far, it was all pretty straightforward.

Now, as mentioned earlier, Alan had a chimney sweeping company (something pretty niche these days) in a fairly rural area. He also offered an even more niche product in the form of a lucky chimney sweep service that could be booked for weddings.

Within the first 2 months of the websites launch, he was contacted by 18 new clients and 3 couples interested in his lucky chimney sweep service. Not bad for a small website that wasn’t using any online marketing (i.e. pay per click advertising, Google ads, etc).

Within the first 6 months he had been asked numerous times about who developed his website from other industry members around the country. He’s very forward in extolling the virtues of a quality website over the ‘do it yourself’ offerings and was happy to tell them about us, his experience and the success of the website.

Now, we don’t see Alan all that often as he’s a VERY busy man, especially with all the new clients being generated via the website. He’s also regularly contacted from much further afield to do his thing, something that was never the case prior to the websites development.

The funny thing is, the last time I spoke to Alan (about 2-3 months ago) he was complaining about his website. Not because there was anything wrong with it; on the contrary. He was complaining that because it was so successful, he couldn’t retire as he’d originally planned!

Not bad for a simple website for a small company in a rural town that had been put off for many years as something that wasn’t really necessary or even relevant to Alan’s business.

So, while some companies wouldn’t benefit from a website; some that think that it isn’t necessary could substantially benefit!