A well-designed website will raise the profile of your business in the eyes of your customers. Potential customers will subconsciously project the qualities or failings of your website upon your business as a whole.

Direct e-commerce sales are an obvious way to make money from a website. This is where products are ordered and paid for online.

You can reach a wider audience if your site is listed in search engine results for product and service areas aligned to your current portfolio. This is achieved via search engine marketing.

By placing the bulk of your marketing material online, you can significantly reduce the printing element of your marketing costs. One company I know used to spend around £25k per year on paper advertising. A £5k investment in a website and their printing costs were cut to £5k per year. With these kind of savings it does not take long before a website has paid for itself.

As your website gets more traffic, advertising can be sold to increase revenue from the website. The most commonly used tool for this is Adsense from Google, but other providers are available or a custom system can be built.

If your business handles a large volume of customer service requests this can be streamlined by implementing an online customer service ticket system. This will reduce your administrative and staffing costs while improving customer retention due to improved customer service.

Another route that can streamline your administrative processes is to provide online customer job progress reports. This way customers do not need to contact you directly, taking up your time, to gain progress information.

Taking the last point further, you can provide tools for your customers' website if they distribute or resell your products. Your customers' customers can then gain, for example, delivery information via your customers' website while you remain anonymous.

If your products are displayed online you can use systems to manage your stock control. This can streamline your other processes.