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Many people who have great business ideas or currently own an off-line business are looking more and more towards the world wide web to get their products and services out to potential customers. As the "young" generations grow up and enter the market, they browse for goods and services online more than ever. Web users are also becoming more ruthless as they demand quality websites from businesses, many of them leaving a website if it is too difficult to navigate or not appealing enough. To launch a successful website for your business, you need to have a few tools and some professional help on your side.
1. Unfortunately many business owners try the "do it yourself" route with their website. They purchase a website template, try to learn programming code to design their site, become frustrated, waste their time better spent elsewhere, and just end up with a poor site than needs to be professionally redone anyway.
Think of this analogy: You go to a friend's wedding. You are expecting a beautiful ceremony with lovely music, flowers, etc. Instead of paying for a musician, the bride and groom have decided to save $300 and do the music themselves. Bob, the groom, has had 2 years of piano lessons as a kid and Sally, the bride, has only practiced her singing along with the radio in the car. The music they perform at their wedding is atrocious and so horrible that you can't stand to stay. You leave the wedding ceremony with a bad taste in your mouth and wish the poor couple luck... sort of.
Take this analogy and imagine your business as the bride and groom and your customer as the wedding guest. If you try to do everything yourself when you are not schooled in the art or knowledge of web designing, you are setting yourself up for failure. Just like the bride and groom should have hired a professionally trained singer and pianist instead of doing it themselves, so you should hire a professionally trained web designer. Spend your time making money for your business and less time trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. For more tips, see article "Working with your Web Deisgner".
2. To template or not to template? There are many people out there who try to sell website templates to average joes with the promise of them being simple to do yourself etc etc. If you are absolutely a penny pincher and cannot afford to have a website designed for you from scratch, consider hiring a web designer who will redesign a template you have selected. DylanDesignLab.com is an example of a professional designer who will also design by template for the benefit of a low budget business. If you find the right designer, your site will not look like a carbon copy of the template, as the designer should be able to integrate the character of your business into the final product. Asking a web designer to design from a template can cut the cost of the website design in half and sometimes even more. This is because the designer does not have to build the theme of the website from scratch and spends less time doing the "behind the scenes" work.
3. Web hosting can be the most difficult part of a business owner's website woes. Hosting is such an intangible component for many people. When you purchase web hosting, you are buying space on a super computer where your site content will be stored securely so that others who are on the internet can access it day or night. When you hire your web designer, ask him/her about web hosting and what preferences they have. Do some research of your own and learn from the mistakes of others. You want inexpensive web hosting, but not something so cheap that you will never get customer service or end up with your website down. Many unfortunate people choose hosting that costs less than peanuts per month. When they have a problem, they find no customer support from their hosting company. It is worth a few more dollars to know there is a team to back up your website. Do it right the first time and you won't have to deal with problems or fix-it expenses down the road. See Article "Getting Your Website Started" for more hosting information.
4. Domain names. For beginner website owners, this term is typically unfamiliar. The domain name is the web address that users type in to find your site. For example, HostRail.com is a domain name. When choosing your domain name, it is best to select something that is easy for a potential customer to remember and recall when they get to their computer. When searching for a domain name that is available to purchase, you may also search .net, .us, .org, etc. These are all legitimate endings that you can use. However, .com has become the universal ending for domain names and it is what most people remember. If at all possible, try to find a domain name that suits your company with a .com ending. Domain name pricing can also be confusing for beginners. Most companies are able to offer .com domains under $8/year. These companies have the right to sell domain names to people like yourself. Other domain name endings like .mn, .tv and others cost more to purchase, so that price gets passed along to the buyer. These price differences in domain endings are not compleatly dictated by the seller.
5. Selling your products online. Sadly, many thrifty business owners run to google checkouts, paypal, yahoo and the like to solve their online cart system needs. At first, these easy solutions appear to save them money and time. What they do not realize is that with these systems, the customer is routed to another site to complete a payment or purchase a product. Consumers loose trust in a website's credibility and easily question the security of the online transaction when this happens. It is not uncommon for a customer to make it to this part of the purchase and abandon it because they feel insecure about giving personal information. Instead of loosing sales to try to save a few peanuts/month, do it right the first time and have your web designer integrate a cart system into your site. OScommerce is a program that is very secure and easy to use. Along with your cart, you should set up a merchant account, which allows you to directly charge all major credit cards on your site. The application process for this can be a real nightmare if you have never done it before. And not all hosting companies can actually apply for the merchant account on your behalf. With the HostRail ecommerce/hosting package, we walk you through this entire process free of charge. You owe it to your customers to have a secure and easy method of payment. Asking them to sign up with paypal or sending them to another site to buy your stuff is unprofessional and ends up costing you more in middle man fees anyway. Do it right the first time and you won't have to redo it later.
Further Reading: "Getting Your Website Started: 10 tips for the clueless"
Copyright HostRail.com, 2008
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