The internet is nearly 20 years old but many businesses are still not maximising the potential of a well-designed online presence. Invest now and you won’t regret it, says David Soskin

A couple of weeks ago, The Financial Times reported that in 2008, 73.5% of UK businesses had a website. This means that 26.5% did not. As someone who has been involved in the digital economy since its infancy in the 1990s, I must admit to being astonished. I suppose at one time the same reluctance to adopt must have been true for telephones. Imagine the business owner saying: ‘A telephone! Stuff and nonsense! Why would I want a telephone? What is the point of this expensive and new fangled technology?’

I am quite certain readers of this column do have websites. They want their businesses to grow which is why they read this magazine. And the internet has become an essential way both to grow businesses and for smaller firms to level the playing field against larger competitors.

I particularly like the example of Mayfair-based perfumery Ormonde Jayne, which has increased its sales exponentially via its well-designed website. Linda Pilkington, Ormonde Jayne’s founder, realised very quickly that her international clientele, having visited her store, could order and reorder via the web. Not only could the website in effect replace an expensive 24/7 call centre, by good design it could tempt its users to spend more money than if they simply placed an order by phone.

It can be a challenge for established businesses to know how best to build up their online operations. As a consequence many do it badly. I can cite innumerable examples of household name companies whose websites are frustratingly poor. The internet demands a new and evolving range of skills which can be difficult for an old economy business to get to grips with.

For example, some years ago, I attended a Google event in London and met one of their new members of staff. He told me he was an ‘optimiser’. When I graduated, I never came across job vacancies for ‘optimisers’. Yet in the new world of the internet, optimisers are a vital – and well paid – resource. These are the people who understand search engines and the ways to make money out of them.

So, while encouraging the 26.5% to get a wiggle on, I also advise caution in how they go about doing it. They need to take a web presence very seriously and understand that it is not just a simple add-on.

The commercial internet is now nearly 20 years old. Unlike a decade ago, there are experienced professionals available with track records in various functional areas that successful digital businesses require: coding, design, marketing, metric analysis and so on. So don’t be afraid of hiring your own online team but, as with any recruitment, take the time and trouble to get it right.

For smaller businesses, building an internet presence entirely in-house can be a financial stretch. So it probably makes sense to contract out the whole effort. The good news is that the costs of building, hosting and managing websites has plummeted in recent years so a simple web presence is extraordinarily cheap. But beware: there are a lot of cowboys out there who will try to overcharge.

So shop around and take references.

Think about Ryanair, presided over by perhaps the best cost-cutter in the history of aviation, Michael O’Leary. When he asked professional web companies to quote for building a website, the proposals rolled in, one of them for £3.5m. In the end, he found two students who offered to build the Ryanair website for £15,500. And being O’Leary, he later beat them down to £12,000, the moral here being: for technology there is no such thing as a list price.