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Why I might consider leasing my company website?
I recently found an article on WikiPedia that suggested numerous benefits to renting your website. It briefly touched on these, but in my mind didn’t really go into half as much detail as I would have liked. As the technical development manager of DriveMySite (a company that specialises in web rentals) I knew I couldn’t walk away without adding my own two cents, simply because this is a subject I have had some experience with and felt I could at least contribtute some honest opinions to anyone out there considering a move in this direction. Before going any further I should mention that objectivity was a challenge for me as I have some natural biases of my own but hopefully the reader can take from my remarks some genuine benefits of web leasing.
There are several reason why a company might consider leasing or renting a website instead of buying.
Leasing often needs only a small monthly fee instead of a large fee upfront when buying. Startups looking to make a impact on the marketing opportunities of the web understand that a full blown design treatment along with all of the issues of upkeep and SEO on a shoe string budget just isn’t realistic. I’ve seen some bad decisions made in this area because some companies either didn’t have all of the available options at hand or didn’t really know what they wanted in the first place.
New small business owners can benefit by saving capital.
This is a primary issue for new startups that need a buffer to protect them against a lot of often unforseeable business expenses. I worked for a company that had a client that spent £14,000 for a well designed website without any good SEO. In effect they ran out of the money they should have used to improve their page rankings and were left with a fantastic looking site with no one to see it. Clients don’t always understand this and suppliers in my opinion should inform their clients of this.
If a website is only needed for a short amount of time.
This has often been the case for companies I have worked with that need to run mini campaigns or ‘sell by date’ type brochure sites. In these cases quick turnaround is the key and having a pre-designed template that can be leased for the duration of the campaign makes good sense. After all why spend all that money if you only need the site around for a few months.
If one is unsure their business needs a website leasing is a way to test without paying for a full price site.
This is great for those ‘proof of concept’ or ‘market testing’ scenarios in which you want to test the waters without breaking the bank. I spoke with a colleague today about a business idea he had. He had already invested some money to get a developer to build a database, purchase the domain name and setup hosting. After speaking to him about his idea it was clear to me that what he really needed was a place to showcase his ideas, generate a social networking group to field test this and go from there before spending any more time and money on the idea.
The owner is responsible for the technical aspects and upkeep of the site.
I was recently sat in a meeting with a client that wanted a awesome looking website and told me that he wanted it to be high up on the rankings in Google. He was uncomfortable with my explanation that to do this organically he would need to invest some time to keep the content updated. After talking this through with him I learned that they used a very clunky FTP based method of updating content. It was time consuming and prone to breaking their existing pages which to some degree explained some his reluctance in relation to keeping his site updated. I was able to explain that a good Content Management System can take care of this without the worry of breaking a page. The more reputable site leasing companies provide these. At drivemysite.co.uk we provide our customers with Umbraco an open source CMS that has recently been endorsed by Microsoft but more importantly has been used by many of the clients I have with worked with and to good effect.
Changes and updates are often included in the monthly fee.
This has to be one of the best benefits of leasing. Like leasing a TV or a Car you pass it back and get a newer model without the hassle of selling it first and losing money in between. A lot of clients I have worked with would often come to me asking for a feature or technology they had seen on a competitors site but because the technology itself had been superceded, it wouldn’t be possible with a complete rewrite of the site and its underlying technology.
There are also tax benefits of leasing a website.
This goes without saying. Although most CEO’s will completely endorse and understand the benefits of leasing when dealing with tangible assets many still don’t consider digital assets in the same way. Changing the mindset of the Managing Director is often the biggest challenge here.
Some companies that offer a website leasing or rental service also give the option for the user to buy the full rights to the site either after a certain amount of time (leasing) or at any time (rental).
This is a real win/win if the website leasing company are prepared to do this as it gives the customer the assurance that the site they have been renting for the duration of the lease already has a proven ROI.
Website leasing and rental companies may also offer Search engine optimization services as part of the leasing or rental package.
This is almost an expectation these days. To me it would be like going into a car showroom and having a salesman show me a car without wheels. SEO enabling technologies need to be baked into the content management system in order to be able to compete in this area. Umbraco takes care of most of this for us, i.e. it allows good naming conventions of URLs, provides Sitemaps for your robots file and allows custom html injection of meta data on a page by page basis.
In summary, leasing your website should be as viable an option to your company as leasing any other asset. If the figures stack up and the SEO investment is their then you could do a lot worse with a lot more money at stake. On the other hand if you make a poor choice with website rental you can always pull out early with the minimal loss.
George Robinson is the technical development manager of drivemysite.co.uk a web company that provides a low cost way to get a SEO powered website up and running quickly and without the stress.
Hotel-Owned Website Receive Limited Exposure on Major Search Engines
Before hotel proprietary Websites can begin to significantly make an impact on reducing the slide in market share of online room sales from third party travel sites they must identify and understand e-consumer search behavior. Windham and Orton (2000) found that 80 percent of respondents or Internet users in their study expected to turn to the Internet more often than current practice for making online purchases. More importantly, sixty-five percent regularly visited a search engine to begin their Internet search activities with travel purchases among the tenth most popular product purchased online. However, there has been mixed messages as to how e-consumers and e-businesses can maximize their efforts and expand their capture rate in the online market respectively. Greenspan (2003a) found that 56% of Internet users give up their search before going past the second page of search engine results. Moreover, over a quarter will move onto another search engine site before refining their keywords. Even with the potential of creating a competitive advantage through the development of proprietary brand Website, hotel companies have missed opportunities to generate traffic on their branded Websites by not considering a strategy to improve their Website visibility in search engines (CyberAtlas, 2001b).
To further examine this concept this author conducted an exploration of finding proprietary lodging brand Websites through search engines using intuitive keywords. After identifying the top seven search engines being used by e-eonsumers in 2003, this researcher ran a search using keywords to identify how e-consumers can easily locate hotels for booking rooms online. The seven most popular search engines used today in order of their popularity are Google, AlltheWeb, Teoma, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, MSN, and Lycos (CybcrAtlas, 2001a).
For each search engine, a common keyword was used to identify the results of hotel proprietary Websites returned from the search. Four keywords were used and included “hotel,” “hotels,” “lodging” and “travel.” When using “hotel” as the keyword Yahoo returned the most proprietary lodging Websites in the first two pages with 15 out of 40 links. All the Web and MSN returned only four and six proprietary lodging Website links respectively within the first two pages. Similar results occurred when using the keyword “hotels.” Surprisingly, when the keyword used was “lodging” only Teoma (12) and MSN (6) returned any links to proprietary Websites. The results were even more discouraging for proprietary lodging Websites when using the keyword “travel” which resulted in no hotel-owned Websites found in the search results within the first two pages. It seems clear that one pan of the Internet strategy that lodging brands need to address to overcome the lack of market share in online room bookings is to get more exposure with the popular search engines when using intuitive keywords.
When searching under the keyword “travel,” Expedia and Travelocity came up within the first two non-sponsored listings in each of the seven most popular search engines. Given the current state of affairs, e-consumers in search of hotel rooms on the Internet may very well find that using third party travel agents represents the most efficient search strategy in terms of time and cost. Hotel-owned Websites must begin developing a better strategy to position their Websites on Internet search engines to drive customers to their Websites. Conventional wisdom seems to contend that a large section of the e-commercial marketplace gravitates toward the sites that listed in their searches and ultimately purchase rooms online based on price alone (Starkov, 2002).