Today I'm starting a new series about how to get started with your online business. Everyone knows the internet is a fantastic place to have a business. Having your own website will give you the opportunity to market to a world wide audience. Never before in history has their been such an opportunity for a relatively small, unknown business to experience success on a massive scale, in a short period of time.

In the future all businesses will require an online presence. Businesses will want to exist in both the real world and the virtual world. They'll want to ensure every part of their company runs with the utmost efficiency. This means they'll need complete automation and virtualization. Those businesses who begin investing in their online presence now will be well ahead of the curb. In fact, a recent study shows businesses who have a substantial online presence are growing over twice as fast as those who don't.

So you're convinced your business needs to be online. Where do you start? Easy - the first thing you'll need to be online is a website. No matter what anyone else tells you - a website is the pillar of your online business. Think of it as your storefront or your office space in the offline world. You need a centralized location where you can conduct business on the web. A place where your clients know they can find you. A place that is 100% yours that you control. No Facebook account, no online yellow pages, no business listing page can offer that. So don't be fooled when someone says you don't need a website. Chances are they're just tyring to sell another competing service.

There are traditionally several ways you can get a website. The first is the hire a web designer. At first this might seem like a good idea. You probably feel you're not an expert in websites and so it only makes sense you'd consider hiring one to do the job for you. Unfortunately there are several problems that come with hiring a web designer.

1. Web designers charge a lot of money.

A good web designer is going to charge a minimum of $100 per hour. If you're talking to someone and they're willing to charge less than that chances are you're their first client. Now I know you probably have a buddy or a relative who "works on websites". I've heard the same story from some many people of the years. They hire a friend, relative, or someone else who does web design in their spare time. They get a really "good deal" on it. Months or sometimes years later the site's still not finished because they couldn't get a hold of their "web guy" or it's simply just not a priority to the web guy because he has another full time job or under bid the project.

2. Web designers aren't available when you need them.

By nature a web designer cannot be in two places at the same time. And chances are you cannot afford to hire someone to work as a full time web designer for your business. At least not while you're starting out. So there's a good chance if you find a good designer he has many other clients. And because he has many other clients when you make a request to redesign something, change some text, a marketing message, whatever it doesn't get done in a timely manner. From my experience even the best web designers take a couple of weeks to make even small tweaks and changes to your site. This can be a big problem because the beauty of the online world is everything thing happens in "realtime".

Let's say you're advertising your website on a search engine like Google. Over 85% of all searches are done on Google so it's very expensive to advertise with them. Especially if you're not getting results. Let's say you put some tracking in place and you notice since changing certain text on your hompeage sales of your product are down 30%. You quickly contact your web designer only to find out he won't be able to change the text back for another week. During that week you'll have to either stop advertising or potentially throw away 30% of your revenue. This is a fast track for going out of business and giving up. What makes matters worse is Google Adwords will actually punish you for not consistantly advertising. So if you're ads are going on pause all the time because you can't afford to advertise while you're waiting for a web designer to make a change to your site it can be very detrimental to your business.

3. Web Desingers Don't Understand Your Business.

In the past when I've hired web designers and then pain stakingly waited for them to make changes to my website I often found those changes weren't what I requested. Because web designers have not inate understanding of your business. No matter how hard you try to communicate with your web designer, unless they're invested in your business they're not going to care the way you do. Even if you take the outrageous step of giving a portion of your business to a web designer in exchange for work you're still not likely to be their only client and they're still not likely to gain understanding of your business.

So now you know why hiring a web designer is not going to help you create a successful online business. What you really need is a way to create and control every aspect of your website yourself. This is going to require you to learn something new. There's no escaping it. The good news is there's a way you can do this without having to learn anything complex and it won't take you a lot of time. By creating a website with WebStarts you're essentially solving the problems that come from hiring a designer and at the same time you're saving a boat load of money. Tomorrow I will be comparing the traditional way to setup a website versus the WebStarts way.