Recently I was asked by a marketing manager to prioritize a list of possible marketing efforts: ads, brochures, radio, trade shows, direct mail, website, public relations, etc. He needed to effectively market his growing business with a small amount of cash and he wanted to know where he could best apply his limited resources.

The answer is simple…a website…because the Internet is the cheapest, most immediate and most pervasive way to project your company’s message over the widest possible audience for comparatively few dollars…especially when compared to television, or newspapers or the Yellow Pages. That’s because Internet users are unified by their interests and needs which makes them easy to target.

The marketing manager already had a website…except it hadn’t been updated in over three years. Why was this a problem? People go online for the latest, most up-to-date information, and it’s all too easy to tell when the website’s content is out of date. To profit from Internet marketing, your website must have the latest information about your business and it must look like it is the freshest among all your competitors. The Internet evolves…mutates is more like it…faster than Madonna. Internet years are twice dog years, so what was state-of-art three years ago is creaky today.

Those who use the Internet to find goods and services, which is increasingly everybody, are connoisseurs of website style and function. They land on an out-of-date website and even if it promises to cure cancer – for free – they’re gone. So the first goal of your website is make you appear ready for business…now…this very minute. That’ll buy about a two seconds of a visitor’s attention, which is long enough for you to connect what you do with what a customers wants…in a manner that reflects your high quality and professional capabilities, which means that your website must look…high quality and professional.

What about template websites? They’re for template businesses, and homemade websites are for bake sales. And, unless you moonlight as an award-winning website designer, resist the urge to do it yourself. That goes for enlisting your nephew, or your friend from Rotary, to build your site. This is crucial. Whatever money you think you’re saving is a fraction of the revenue you’re losing because your website looks…cheap. Put another way, do you let just anyone cut your hair? Choose your clothes? Paint your house? A website – more than a brochure, or a storefront, or a logo – is your public face to the whole World Wide Web.

Besides, a basic, top-notch website created from scratch costs about as much as designing and printing several thousand top-notch color brochures, and unlike the brochures – which will be out-of-date shortly after the ink dries – your website can always be easily updated and you’ll never run out of copies.

So, suck it up and hire a pro. Actually hire two pros…good designers generally don’t do HTML, which is a kind of computer programming, and programmers – as a rule – are not trained as graphic designers. “But Web design is different…all web guys do it.” No, it isn’t and no, they can’t. The Internet is a graphic medium. The time-honored rules of color, composition, typesetting, etc., the same ones that make one printed page attractive and another look like a ransom note are the same whether it’s paper or pixels.

One last thought…If you’re thinking that I’m some techno-junkie who thinks marketing began with Netscape sometime in the late 90’s, you’re mistaken. I started in advertising when ads were pasted up with wax, AM was still the dominant radio and portable video cameras were the size of suitcases. Like every other old ad guy I had to learn this new media. Thank goodness I did, because the Internet is the most powerful marketing tool yet invented and if you’re not making the most of it…I’ll bet your competition is.