A LOT of companies who sell business websites primarily sell all-encompassing marketing solutions and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Everything (in theory) works together and there are no extra integrations to manage. A lead comes in through your website and is instantly visible in your CRM. It’s great, right?
Well, maybe. But what if it doesn’t? What if you want to switch out just ONE piece of what the all-in-one package offers? You’re probably looking at switching out everything. That’s a substantially bigger project. One you probably don’t have time for. You can see why providers do it this way. The cost of switching is very high, so you’ll put up with a lot - including annual rate increases.
We’re big fans of compartmentalizing. We avoid being dependent on one company for more than one service. Our phone company has nothing to do with our email. We use a different company for website hosting than we do for email hosting. We don’t use our domain registrar for anything other than domain registration. Yes, we have more vendors and passwords and credit card charges to keep track of. But when a service starts to degrade, we can swap out that one piece without disrupting our entire ecosystem. That switch barely makes a ripple in our day-to-day operations, and that is worth a lot to us.
If you’re shopping for a new website, be sure you’re considering the downstream effects of going all-in with one vendor. The “bundled savings” or “free website included” may sound attractive up front, but in a year from now, the cost to untangle yourself from a service that is either not working out or is now beyond your budget may be more than the savings.
In many cases, you get what you pay for out of the “free website” that was included in your package. The customization is minimal, the updates are either difficult or expensive, and you don’t have much control over the content.
One last thing to mention today to readers looking to get a new website - Webtricity doesn’t use WordPress. We’ll leave it at that, but you can do some research on why that might be a valuable benefit for your website. (You can start here, here, or here.)
You can get started on a Webtricity site right now for only $1.
If you have questions or want some help, schedule a call with one of our website experts who can walk you through everything you need to know.