Do I need a website?
Many people in India, even today, think a website is a luxury for a business. Not many realise that a website is not just a necessity for a business but also a corporate identity in the world wide web. However, few have flown swiftly with the winds of change and adopted the technology for economic benefits. This can be seen in the increasing number of websites from India. On an average, every week, about 1000 new Indian websites are launched and this is a substantial number but not enough.
Coming back to the question – “Do I need a website?”. The answer entirely depends on what you do and what benefits the website would bring to you/your profession/your business/your individuality. Owning a website has become so fashionable and cheap that many software professionals are having a website of their own to publicise their Re’sume’s, their projects, their hobbies and even their holidays and personal diaries. This trend of personal websites is not limited to software professionals only. Many economists, stock brokers, actors, etc. have their own website where they interact with their customers/fans. A discussion forum on a website is becoming more common than it used to be, say, 5 years ago. Credit has to be given to all those open source programmers who not just came up with many good bulletin boards like phpBB and punBB but are also distributing them freely.
The cyber sector comprising of domain names and web hosting is still not very organised in India. To date, there is only one ICANN Accredited Domain Name Registrar in India. There hasn’t been much interest even by the private parties in the web hosting service except a few leading business houses like Tata Internet, Satyam Infoway and very recently Reliance Infocomm. The shared web hosting arena where more than 75% of the world’s websites are hosted, only a handful of players like Rediff and Indiatimes can be named. This is partly because of the domination of interconnectivity by VSNL which was a Government organisation until very recently and partly because of the heavy investment needed in setting up an Internet DataCentre (IDC). The bandwidth costs are still very high in India compared to the United States. That is probably why most of the small website hosting service providers in India resell the American bandwidth. That is a separate business model about which I will tell you some day. For now, until Indian Government does not decide to do something about the bandwidth costs, web hosting in India would be costlier.
There are many business sectors where, today, having a website is a must for business operations. For example, in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector where the end customer is not always from the same city or in many cases from the same part of the world. These websites will probably benefit the most from a website of their own listing out their offerings and their contact information. I believe the resulsts would be very astonishing and the business soaring (well, if you have what the customer wants to buy).
Over a period, I will write about various industries and how a website could make a difference to the industry in general. So, add this website to your farourites. For now, the judgement is to be made based on the possibilities and opportunities which await you/your business if you have a website.
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