The following ten tips will help you clarify your need for a site, what you want your site to accomplish and how you want your site to look.

1.Ask yourself, "what am I selling and why do I want a website?" Are you using it to sell products or services? Your products or the products of others? Will you just give potential customers basic product information and contact details? Or, do you want to sell your products directly? Will you offer customers a combination of products/services and useful content? 

2. If you decide to sell online how will you handle orders? Off-line via an e-mailed order form, on-line with a secure order form or by a secure online shopping cart? If you use a cart, will you process credit cards by a direct merchant account, instant merchant account with 2Checkout or virtual merchant account such asPayPal, ProPay or other third party payment processor?

3. If you do not have a domain name, (i.e. www.your-name.com.) go here to check the availability and get your name (for $14.99). We can also register or transfer the registration of a new domain name for you. If you already have your name, we will handle the transfer of your domain host. 

4. Do you have a domain name but no web site? Frequently, business owners will register a domain name with Budget Register or other registrar before they have a host server upon which to place their site. We will determine how much space you need. But you need to know how many e-mail addresses do you want and for whom? Do you want an automatic message called an autoresponder to be sent to those who correspond with you? If so, what do you want to say?

5. Think about the pages we include in your web site and decide what you want to put on those pages. 

6. Decide if you want any additional options for your site: a search form, site-map, guest book, mutual links, affiliate programs, sound or music, animated graphics, news ticker, flash animation, street maps, additional forms, Java Scripts, pop-ups, auto-responders, custom Confirmation form, password protection, bulletin boards, chat groups, database etc.

7. Think about the "look and feel" you want for your site. We aim to produce search engine friendly business web sites that are clean, appealing, uncomplicated and easy-to-use. Do you want your site with a colored background or not? Images for banner and buttons or text? What colors appeal to you? Do you want to use only the colors in your logo or company brochure?

8. And, speaking of a logo...do you have one? Do you have special text you want to use on your site? If so, we will need a copy of your documents letterhead, brochures, catalog, etc. either a hard copy or in digital format.  You can snail mail or email them to us. If you plan to send the photos for scanning, label them by name. If you are sending digitized images on a diskette or CD-Rom, save the photos in a jpeg (.jpg) format. Clip art should be in the gif (.gif) format. Images can also be e-mailed to us as an attachment or inserted into any e-mail messages. 

Don't worry, if you do not have photos for your services website. We can create them for you or purchase stock photos. You will however, need to select product graphics/photos for your site and send the scanned images to us by e-mail. You can send original graphics by snail mail.

9. Do a little research on the web to see how many other web sites are already selling your product and how many are in your geographical location. Use Yahoo, Google, Mamma and AltaVista or Hotbot. Yahoo is directory that generate results from registered sites. Mamma, Excite and AltaVista are meta search engines meaning they will query more than one search engine at the same time. Google is the highest rated meta search engine that also uses results from the Open Directory. 

This exercise will help you see how many other people are selling your products on the Web, how they are selling them and their geographical location. Search under your product/service name (i. e. "blue widgets") Then, combine that product with your location (i. e. "blue widgets in Anytown USA").  Doing so will help you get a feel for your market on the web. The more you know about your market, the better. (We will also do this in order to target a niche for your business.)

10. Visit the sites that appear on the first three pages of search results for your product/service. And, visit the top 30 that come up under your product name in your geographical location. Write down the address of the sites you like. Write down what you like best about them and decide which of those features you want on your own site. Bookmark them. Tell us where they are and we will take a look at them. This helps us get a feel for your design taste. 

[ Planning a site ] [ Domain Names ] [ Cost of Owning a Web Site ] [ Finding A Host ] [ E-Commerce Resources ] [ Site Development ] [ Site Promotion ] [ Business Glossary ] [ Reading List ] [ Hiring a designer ] [ 106 Marketing Tips ]