I know a lot of small business owners who are extremely good at what they do: dentists who give unparalleled dental care, real estate agents who get you the best possible price for your house, and tax reviewers who save you thousands of dollars. Can you guess why they are so phenomenal in their field? It’s because they’ve spent their time developing those skills. They have not spent that time learning how to build a web site, configure a hosting package, and create email accounts.

Perhaps it’s unfair then that when we see a business card that has an email address from hotmail, yahoo, or any of a dozen other free email providers, we interpret that as an indication that this person and this business might be a fly-by-night operation. But that is in fact a judgment a lot of people make. A business that is using a free email address must be cheap. What other corners are they going to cut?

Having worked with so many small business owners over the last few years, I now know there are a lot of small businesses that do fantastic work and yet use a free email account. Potential customers who see their business card for the first time don’t know about the fantastic work. All they see is the free email account, which will scare some of them off.

So I recommend to all my clients that they use an email account with a domain name that matches their web site. After all, when they bought the domain name they paid for all the email addresses that go along with it. If they want to keep using their current email address, I suggest creating an alias for their business cards that will forward messages to their existing inbox. There’s no change in how they send and receive messages, but they present a more professional image to the world.

It takes so little time to set this up if you know what to do. Since my clients don’t, I handle it for them. It’s a little something extra that I can provide.

filed under: Web Development