The Benefits of Having a Website

If you are asking the question 'Why should I have a website?', you still have some doubts about whether the Internet will work for your business.

Just look at the facts... They speak for themselves:

• Some 24 million UK consumers shopped online in 2005, spending on average £816 each during the year, and £208 in the run-up to Christmas.
• For 2005 as a whole, spending over the internet in the UK totalled £19.2bn, 32% more than 2004.
• As of June 30th, 2006, over 1.04 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats
• The Internet accounted for 26% of all high street sales in 2005 - what is more enlighteming is that a further 28% used the Internet for research - that's more than 50% of the buying process was initiated via the web- time to get on line!
• Total number of internet users in Europe and the World [Internet World Stats, January 2007]:
  
  • Europe: 308,712,903
  • World: 1,076,203,987
• Total Internet users are at 37,600,000 in the UK, out of an estimated population of 60,363,602. This amounts to a 3.5% share of the world internet users. [ITU, September 2006]
• On average, internet users spend a quarter of their weekly viewing time on the internet. [BMRB Internet Monitor, January 2006]
• The internet is the second most commonly used medium after television. [BMRB Internet Monitor, January 2006]
• 91% of adults who have ever used the Internet have used a search engine to find information. [Office of National Statistics, October 2005]
• For many businesses, websites have become an essential means of communication with customers. In 2005, 70 per cent of businesses reported owning a website, whilst one in three (31 per cent) had an intranet, and 8 per cent had an extranet. [E-Commerce Survey, Office for National Statistics, 2005]
• The proportion of businesses that sold over the Internet doubled between 2002 and 2005, from 7 to 15 per cent. [E-Commerce Survey, Office for National Statistics, 2005]
• £30bn of retail spending in the UK occurs online, a further £20bn of other spending is conducted online and £30bn in offline spending is influenced by internet information or research. [IMRG Index Survey, 2006]
• Online retail sales have grown by 45 per cent year-on-year for the past six months and have increased 2,000% in the past six years.[IMRG Index Survey, 2006]

Whilst these figures show no sign of slowing the Internet can only grow from strength to strength.

Future developments include a push to promote Internet TV and Mobile Internet, which can only increase growth of the Internet even further. The one to watch is the huge potential via mobile phones, SMS messaging will move forwards in giant leaps over the next 18 months and will direct traffic to websites. Businesses need to evolve and embrace the Internet or be left behind.

The number of users and purchasers online are not the only benefits of a website.

Below are some benefits of developing your business online:

• Potential customers have full access to your products and/or services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
• Better promotional management. Offline marketing literature generally needs to be re-printed or re-designed. A website can be changed easily in realtime.
• Marketing you can quantify. Using online website statistics you can see who visited, from where and when. A marketing dream! We use Urchin statistics on our sites to analyise data. Click here to see more.

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