Seven Steps to Success
To get your website from an idea to an online reality requires many things, but one of the most important is a plan.
Here's an example.
1. Develop a Concept
The first step is to develop a concept . Obviously this is easy when getting an already existing business online , but it still requires consideration especially when identifying significant differences between your offline and online presence. You need to be confident about what is your objective and how you intend to achieve it, before you take it online.
What's unique about your business?
If your website includes e-commerce, you will need to consider the revenue model. Do you provide for posting of cheques as well as online credit card facilities? Would you consider allowing advertising on your site or selling other value-added related products? Can you cover the cost of hosting and marketing?
2. Define Content
To have a successful website you need to provide interesting and timely content, something to convince visitors to bookmark your site and return. A good way of doing this is to provide more information on something you specialize in, other than just the normal brochure or catalogue content.
If you provide for online ordering or e-commerce, your content must convince visitors that they are dealing with a reputable company and that whatever they order will be delivered and satisfactory to them. You should address privacy issues if you are asking visitors to supply their personal details. State your policy on return of faulty goods and customer support.
If your customers are likely to be overseas, you may consider links to other information such as customs etc.
3. Identify your Customers
You obviously should have a good idea of you your current customers are, spend some time identifying who they are, categorize them if possible, ensure that there is content for each category in the website. See if you can anticipate where likely new customers may come from.
Each market may need a different marketing and service delivery approach, so part of the concept development stage should involve exactly how to handle this.
4. Register your Domain Name
The next stage is to get a Domain Name. Your first decision is do you get an international (.com) or Australian one (.com.au). The Australian regulations are a lot tighter on what name you can request in that it must be close to your registered business name and /or be a registered company. You can also only have one URL per company.
Just as in choosing a business name, you need to choose a domain name that reflects what your business does, more importantly what a customer would expect your business to do.
For more information or to check your domain name availability go to our domain names page.
5. Build your Site
You may consider that you already have the skills to now build your web site and if it is a fairly basic site this may be true. Plus there are a number of simple to use editors, but these have a tendency to produce poorly coded pages which usually result in longer download times. Do you have the time to do it yourself? If your site is a little more complex, including frames and forms or a database backend or e-commerce, this is usually the realm of the professional.
For more information, applications and links about E-Commerce check out our e-commerce page
There are many design issues and techniques which a professional can assist; optimized graphics, consistent and easy to use navigation, browser compliance, use of JavaScript or plugins, weighting of pages and site testing to name a few.
The best way to start is to sit down with a pen and paper and rough-out each page of your site and map out the relationships between the pages and navigation.
Remember also that once your site is online the work does not end there. You must update and add new information regularly.
6. Hosting and Posting
Now your ready to put your site online. But how and where? You could do it yourself, but this is very expensive. You would need a permanent large connection to the internet and a server with the appropriate back up facilities. The next step down from this is to have somebody maintain or host this dedicated server for you, still very expensive, but at least you don't have to look after it anymore. The third and most common option is to share a hosted server with a number of other websites.
Under this shared arrangement you will be limited to the space you have on the server, and how much traffic your site generates and the amount of data you transfer. But you will usually receive a number of email accounts and statistics about your site for free. Plus you can run a number of CGI and Java scripts. You will have to pay extra for secure server pages (for e-commerce).
To actually get the pages from your computer to the hosted server you use one of the standard features of the Internet, File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There are a number of software programs which make FTP easy, we use WS-FTP. But another popular one is Cute FTP.
You may be able to use the same ISP you are using to access the internet, or you may choose to use an independent ISP or Virtual Host who can guarantee a more reliable service. We currently use and recommend Cyber Host, who will provide 25Mb for $275 per annum.
7. Promotion and Marketing
Now comes the last, but probably most important part of the whole process. There are literally millions of websites out there and who knows how many related to your business. How do you ensure that your site stands out? That you get some value for all the hard work you've put in preparing your web site.
Firstly, ensure that you have added META TAGS to all your pages and that they accurately reflect your business. Next, register your site with the popular search engines. NOTE: they will take some time to review or index your site, up to 8 weeks.
Make sure all your stationery has the web address on it, from letterheads, to business cards to invoices. As well as any advertising that you have in magazines etc, should prominently display your web address.
Offer to share or swap links with other sites. Actively request a link from those sites you look at and use.
You can buy advertising on other websites in the form of banner ads or sponsorships, but these are only having limited success with less than 1 click through per 100 impressions.
