Does Your Business Still Need a Website?

Do you need a website to sell cupcakes? (photo courtesy of The Shoppe)

A recent magazine article making the rounds from Entrepreneur asks this question, “Does Your Business Still Need a Website?” Citing the ability for businesses to maintain a Web presence via strictly social media, the article offers tepid examples of how this can be successful.

Even startups such as Digital Americana, a soon-to-launch web-based multimedia literary and culture magazine designed specifically for the Apple iPad, have been emboldened to launch without a formal website.

“So far,” says Tony Fasciano, the New York-based magazine’s publisher, “by using Tumblr as the main blog site, and creating pages on Twitter and Facebook, we have been able to generate about 100 page views a day–all without yet issuing our first press release.”

While I don’t doubt this can be a successful technique for some companies, the aforementioned Digital Americana is a weak case study. Online marketing should be more measurable than 100 page views a day. Post iPad launch it would be much more valuable to see the examples of downloads to determine success rather the ability to have achieve 100 page views a day. That’s what matters.

One local example of a company using social media rather than a website is Denver cupcake bakery The Shoppe Denver. Yet while they use WordPress as its web platform, it still contains all of the typical components of a website including an About Us, Hours+Location and Weddings page. While the front page is in fact a blog, the rest of the format reflects your run-of-the mill site. Same with Digital Americana. What Entrepreneur is really asking is can your company maintain its website on a blogging platform (e.g. Tumblr or WordPress)? Sure. Who cares about the platform? What matters is that whatever platform you use needs to have comprehensive analytics to understand how your web presence is driving your business.

Curious to hear from SMBs that are either strictly using a blogging platform or forgoing even a blogging platform and just using sites like Twitter or Facebook?