What I am about to tell you is not a secret at all. In fact the majority of entrepreneurs know very well that most small businesses thrive on foot traffic and word of mouth alone. These two forms of advertisement are often all a business needs in the way of advertising. However, for those businesses who do not have the luxury of a storefront or the immediate draw of predisposed notoriety, bringing your presence to the web can be just as rewarding.

I cannot tell you how many times I have searched the web over for that particular small business or company across town, only to come up empty handed. All I really wanted to know was either the store hours or to take a quick peek at the takeout menu – only to discover that this particular business hasn’t even taken the time to be listed in an online business listing site. In today’s world, this can be quite disconcerting for the average consumer.

Although listing your business is a great step towards an online presence, most of these free business listing sites leave much to be desired (kind of like a phone book). Most, if not all patrons and clients would much rather see a simple, clean website with more information than just the hours of operation, phone number, and address. A refreshingly designed website can draw the customer in, just as a storefront location draws window shoppers in off of the streets. For an entrepreneur, the benefits of a website as a long-lasting advertising tool should far outweigh the thought process of keeping business simple by staying off of the web.

No, this doesn’t mean that you need to spend tons of well-earned money on a custom built website. Today, there are more inexpensive solutions than you may think. After the economy’s downturn in September, 2008, many previously thriving web companies began to realize that small businesses could no longer afford their beautiful, custom built websites. In fact, many small businesses began turning to free online advertising tools like Facebook and Twitter. In 2009, in order to meet the growing needs of small businesses, Facebook morphed into the company that it is today by offering pages specifically for businesses.

Now that the economy is headed back up and many companies are again able to begin thinking about building or updating their websites, there is an overwhelming realization that spending tons of money on a custom built website is not the only answer. The fact is that during the economic recession, web designers and developers began looking into the future by making a way to offer bulk websites at a much cheaper rate. The birth of this rational idea brought about the rise of the once despised web themes. I say despised because at one time, web themes were very generic blog-like pages that seemed to lack any sort of personality.

Ok, you may still be asking yourself, “what is a web theme anyway?” Well, over the past few years these personality-lacking themes developed into something more user-friendly and well designed. Web design companies began putting extreme effort into building beautiful websites which are made to be sold to hundreds and even thousands of people/companies around the world. Most, if not all of these themes are created with the sole purpose of being flexible enough so that they can retain their beauty while the customer is able to use a plethora of included settings and options to change the contents and layout, molding the theme to perfectly fit the purpose of that company’s particular needs.

If you’re wondering where to find these web themes, don’t be shy, start by visiting themeforest.net and creativemarket.com which are just a few of the very best companies offering a seemingly never-ending supply – with new themes being added daily.

To find out more about the process of buying, setting up, and maintaining a website theme, please contact me.