Does Your Website Have a Power-Seat Option?

It's post Thanksgiving, and many of us are now awakening from our self-inflicted food comas. While the world ate their stuffed turkey and glazed ham, I spent most of my Thanksgiving meal discussing websites and I'm not ashamed of it.

Of course, I wasn't the one to start the conversation; rather, my uncle was interested in creating a website for his business. Without giving away all the trade secrets (specifics on: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc.), I explained to my uncle that selecting or choosing the features for your website is very similar to buying a car.

There are different types of cars (websites), for different purposes:
1. The Sports Car

(Photo credit FotoSleuth ) Does your website need to be nice and shiny? Will it need the latest and greatest features? Are you okay with very little trunk space and frequent trips to the gas station? At times, websites need to be trendy. They need to be Flash-y (not a typo). And most of all, they need to serve only one purpose: too make your company logo look really, really cool.

2. Economy Car

(Photo credit Rd. Vortex )

Are you looking for something reliable, with not many passengers? Some small businesses are just looking for a site that can assist their employees. A website with a simple purpose can become a great tool (i.e. live inventory lists so your sales teams know what's immediately available for your customers)

3. Truck

(Photo credit sellers8847 )

Do you need to do some heavy lifting? Are you able to load lots of furniture (web content), into the bed of your trunk? Are you familiar with moving furniture? Large websites not only take lots of planning, but also lots of work to maintain (i.e. consider how adding a blog to your company website means that someone will have the job of producing content and managing the posts and comments).

So, are we there yet?

Of course, this car and websites analogy could be taken further. In some cases, large businesses need 18 wheelers! Whichever the case, I told my uncle to think about the purpose of his website. I reminded him that very few websites actually need to be all-encompassing 18 wheelers.

In closing, I explained, "Not everyone will like the car you drive, but that's okay, because not everyone will have the chance to drive it."