Plan Your Site Carefully

First, identify clear marketing goals for your site, such as generating leads, building a database of potential customers’ names and e-mail addresses, or putting a product catalog online to save the time and expense of printing and mailing. Quantify your objectives—such as increasing sales by 15 percent—so you know whether or not your site is successful. 

Quantify your goals for sales, clicks, or inquiries so you can objectively measure the success of your e-commerce Web site.

Then, figure out what your potential customers need to know before buying your products and services. This might include:

• An overview of your company, its products and services, and their applications
• Complete product or service descriptions, including features, key benefits, pricing, product specifications, and other information, for each product or service
• Testimonials, or success stories so customers can see how similar individuals or organizations have worked with you
• A FAQ section that anticipates and answers customers’ common issues

Plan the structure of your site, focusing on making it easy for customers to learn what they need to know, make a purchase decision, and then buy quickly. Create a site map that outlines every page on your site starting with the home page and mapping how customers get from one page to the next. Use tools that quantitatively measure site activity-where customers are clicking, how often, and whether they end up purchasing-then compare the results with your goals.

 

Written by e-Reporter on March 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Find The Right Online Home

Web Site Hosting

Web site hosting services have never been more economical. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may provide very basic web hosting services for little or no extra cost. This is, however, not usually a very good solution for an internet business. Pages served from ISPs often load very slowly, data storage is limited, and such essentials as databases and shopping carts are not supported. ISP hosted services are often fine for personal web pages, but are inadequate for money making businesses.

Selecting a Host For Your Site

Your Web site is a series of files that reside on a special computer, called a Web server, connected to the Internet. For customers to visit your site, they must actually connect to that Web server via the Internet and view the files. Web servers and the Internet connections that link them to visitors must be fast and powerful enough to quickly respond to all the visitors’ requests to view your site.

Large businesses prefer the complete control of purchasing, setting up, and managing their own Web server hardware and software. Other small- and medium-sized businesses prefer to turn to a Web hosting company, instead of investing in the hardware, software, and infrastructure necessary to get online. For a monthly fee, Web hosting companies will connect your site to the Internet at high speed via one of their Web servers, allowing the site to be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser. The host provides your site with space on a server, and also offers Web server software, access to its high-speed Internet connection, tools for managing and maintaining your site, customer support, e-commerce features, and more. There are many Web hosting options to choose from, so use the following list to find one that meets your needs.

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What to Look for in a Web Hosting Company 

• Shared hosting or dedicated server. Shared hosting is an arrangement in which your site is housed on the same host server with several other Web sites. This is an economical solution for smaller sites. Paying the host for your own dedicated server, a solution used by larger and busier sites, provides faster access and ensures that your site will be accessible to visitors 100 percent of the time (instead of sharing Web server speed and power with other sites). Does your ISP or Web hosting provider offer both options?
• Hard-disk storage space. Smaller sites may need only 300-500 MB (megabytes) of Web site storage space, while busier e-commerce sites may need at least 9 GB (gigabytes) of space-or their own dedicated Web server. As your site grows, your hosting company should be able to accommodate you with a range of options.
• Availability. If you run an e-commerce business, your site must be accessible to customers 24 hours a day. Web hosts maximize the availability of the sites they host using techniques like load balancing and clustering. Can your host promise near 100% availability?
• E-mail accounts. E-mail accounts that match your domain name are often available from your host. Are they included with your monthly access and hosting fee?
• SSL Encryption: The security of the credit card numbers and other personal information customers send you should be a top concern. Does your ISP or Web host protect your site with an SSL server ID? See Step Four below to learn more about Web site security.
• Support. A big part of the value of turning to an ISP or Web host is that you don’t have to worry about keeping the Web server running. Does your host offer 24×7 customer service?

Written by e-Reporter on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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Establish Your Online Identity with the Right Web Address

Domain Names

The first step toward e-commerce is selecting the name of your site. Your Web address (also called a URL or “domain name”), tells customers who you are and how to find you on the Internet. It is the core of your Internet identity-your online brand. And because no two parties can have the same Web address, your online identity is totally unique.

What’s In a Name?
Quite a lot, actually. Remember that not only does your domain name act as your address on the Web, but it also communicates and reinforces the name of your business to every Web site visitor. It can also be used as part of your e-mail address to reinforce your online identity.

Keep these tips in mind before you choose your domain name:

• Make it memorable. “Amazon.com” is more unique and less limiting than “booksonline.com.”
• Describe your business. Avoid confusion by simply and logically describing your business. “Flowers.com” obviously leads one to believe they can buy flowers on the site. If you are setting up an online presence for an established business, keep the name of your site the same as the name of your business
• Keep it short. The best domain names are those that customers can remember and type into their browsers after seeing or hearing them only once, so complicated strings of words like “onlinecdstore.com” don’t work as well as a simple phrase: “cdnow.com.”

How to Get and Manage Domain Names

Once you’ve decided on your Web identity, the next step is to determine if it is available and then register it with a domain name company or “registrar.” Registering is easy and inexpensive, so do it as soon as you’ve decided on your domain name to make sure you get the name you want.

Many businesses register a number of variations, just in case they want to use them later-or to avoid the risk of competitors obtaining similar names. You also may want to register common misspellings so that customers who type your address incorrectly still find their way to your site instead of receiving an error message. E-commerce businesses most often register a name with “com” as the domain name extension (the letters after the dot; also called a top-level domain, or TLD), but names with “.net” and “.org” (for “organization”) are also common. Other suffixes include “.edu” for schools and universities, “.biz” for small businesses, “.us” for United States based Web sites, and “.info” for resource Web sites. Aditionally, the “.ws” suffix is often used to mean “Web Site”.

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JDR-net provides domain name registration services for as little as $9.95 per domain. Search for an available name and register it with JDR-net at JDR-net.net. Just type in the Web address you’ve chosen, select the extension you want and click “GO.” In seconds you’ll know if the name is available.

Written by e-Reporter on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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Why is it important to plan your web site?

 
• Prevention is better than cure: With an automobile, (where preventive maintenance is preferable to—and less expensive than—post-incident repairs) it is always better to keep the engine’s oil changed on a regular schedule than it is to have to rebuild the motor. The same is true with your health. Exercise and nutrition may prevent more serious disease. When planning a web site, planning ahead will often prevent serious problems later on. There are few things more annoying than changing plans in the middle of a process. Of course you will always be exposed to mischances, but by planning ahead you will avoid potential problems that would require major modifications along the way.
• Faster development: People needing a web site usually fall into two categories: those who have a clear idea of what they want, and those who want “just to be on the Internet”. At first it would seem that the second type might be more permissive, making the development smoother. But on the contrary, this will often result in objections, additions, and modifications—slowing down the process. If you have not a clear idea at first, you will only know exactly what you want when you see it. And trial-and-error isn’t a wise method for developing anything.
• Better performance: By aiming to an objective through all the steps of the web development process, the final result will be more consistent with your original idea. The efficiency of your web site to achieve your main goals will rely mainly on your initial planning.

Written by e-Reporter on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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How can a blog help you?

Blogs are constantly creating new business opportunities. While some time ago blogs were almost an exclusive territory for non-professional bloggers sharing their thoughts, experiences and ideas, currently small and large business have a wide presence in the blogging world. There are a number of potential benefits of adding a blog as part of your marketing strategy or as a business model:

• Blogs spread information: Blogs allow you to publish information instantly and frequently, and the conversational nature of blogs will help you spread that published information. Not only your visitors will read it, but also other blogs will reference your content through reviews, news, comments… and will link to your site, allowing other Internet users to access that given information. In addition, your blog can capture the attention of the media, which frequently uses the blogs for source material.
• Blogs give you feedback: Most blogs allow readers to comment on your posts or link to them (and notify your site) on their own blogs. This is an automated mechanism that provides you instant feedback on any issue. You can know what your readers think of you (or your product/service/company) almost in real time.
• Blogs build you a reputation: Always you provide useful and honest content, a business blog can help position you as an expert in your niche. Blogs can be considered as a platform for expressing your knowledge, expertise and experience, so they are a powerful tool for building you a solid reputation.
• Blogs are marketing tools: Blogs are a useful and low-cost marketing tool as they improve the awareness of your product/service/company and strengthen the loyalty of your customers (readers). The word-of-mouth will provide you a way into audiences that couldn’t be reached efficiently in any other way.
• Blogs are an easy content management system: The ease of use of blogs as a content management system (CMS) will allow you to forget the programming and the design of your web site and will also help you reduce costs. You can create your blog using free blog hosting services like Blogger or run free software like Wordpress on your own web hosting (preferable for business blogs). In both cases you can adapt the appearance of your blog through free professional-looking templates (themes). This makes creating and updating web sites faster, easier and cheaper then ever.
• Blogs are search engine traffic generators: Lastly, search engines have been driving their efforts to reward rich-content sites, due to the great amount of poor-content sites built with the only purpose of generating revenue through advertising. As blogs are generally based on valuable and original content, they are especially appealing to search engines.The linking structure inherent in blogs is another determinant in the equation. As other blogs reference your web site articles, they will link to them. Moreover, comments and trackbacks frequently include a link back to the blogger’s site. Because incoming links are one of the most important ranking factors in major search engines, it’s obvious that blogs are great platforms to generate search engine traffic.

Written by e-Reporter on March 24th, 2006 with no comments.
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What is a blog?

Though there are different approaches to weblogs, they can be defined as web sites where users post entries (news, articles…), updated frequently and normally reflecting the thoughts of the blog’s creator. Those entries (posts) are typically listed in reverse chronological order (the most recent entry on the top).

Most blogs allow visitors to leave their own comments on the diverse entries or even references from other blogs (trackbacks). This communication between different blogs and bloggers is one of the main factors involved in the fast growth of the so-called “blogosphere” (the whole community of blogs) and its current influence.

Written by e-Reporter on March 24th, 2006 with no comments.
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