52 Fridays is a year-long series for equestrian professionals and equine business owners and managers, with marketing and public relations information, ideas, tips, & resources shared here each Friday. New EMAIL blog subscribers receive a ’52 Fridays’ PDF when they sign up; existing subscribers and new RSS FEED & WORDPRESS subscribers can send a request for their own PDF here.
In these days of Internet-connected-everything, it’s sometimes hard to believe that some horse businesses still don’t have websites. Yet, it’s true. If yours is one of those businesses, and you’re asking ‘should I go ahead with a website, and what should it be like?,’ here’s your answer….
It depends.
Depends on what your goals are, what types of products or services you have, who’s in your target market(s), and how you connect with your customers. Are you already successful, meeting your financial goals, with everything cooking along at a good clip? Great, you probably don’t need me OR a website! But if you’re struggling to gain new customers, get repeat business from current or past clients, or looking for ways to expand your business, then a website might be a logical next step for you.
The next question is, do you want a static or a dynamic website? Say what?!
Wikipedia has a great page about websites that gives a lot of good detail. Basically, ‘static‘ sites are sort of like online brochures; they can present information like an About page, contact information for your business, pictures, that sort of thing. ‘Dynamic‘ sites are able to change or customize themselves; you start with a designed template and a database of information, and the site can ‘plug & play’ sites that are different for each viewer based on things like information ‘read’ from your computer (e.g., ‘cookies’) or how you interact with the site (e.g., rolling your mouse over an element on the page).
If you’re looking for something simple and small, without a lot of pages, then there’s nothing wrong with having a static site. It can provide an entry point for people to find you on the Internet. For a dynamic site, the effort is put into compiling and maintaining the database instead of creating a bunch of static, unchanging individual pages, which is more efficient.
Websites used to be the only option for a Web presence, but no more. Still, if you want to develop a site for your own horsebiz, be sure to discuss with a programmer the various pros and cons of static and dynamic sites.
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Please note: In doing research for this post, I discovered that in April, 2010, the AP Stylebook decided to use the spelling ‘website’ instead of ‘Web site.’ Apparently, I musta missed that memo! But, here’s the tweet about it. While website had long been my own preference, because I write for a number of publications who follow AP Style, I tended to stick with Web site. However, going forward I’ll be using ‘website!’
Do you have a website for your horse business? Is it ‘static’ or ‘dynamic? Please click on the Leave a Comment button to send in a link, I’d love to see it! See you here next Friday for 52 Fridays #7!