Wordpress Development, Email Marketing Australia, Magento Development, Facebook Design and Development

If you have never had a website before, this is what you need to start up. Basically if there was no internet, it would be the same as starting a brick and mortar shop. Lets look at the steps. You would need to register a business. For an online website you would need to register a domain. You have choices of the following (www.yourbusiness.com, www.yourbusiness.net, www.yourbusiness.com.au, www.yourbusiness.net.au). There are other domain endings as well but we do not recommend using them unless you are a non profit organization or an association or a mobile website.

Once you have the name sorted, the next stage is to lease some space. As you would rent out a space or a shop for your physical store, you will need space on the website. This is called website hosting. Please make sure that you get enough space (at least 100 Mbs and 1GB traffic) per month. This will ensure that if you get an upsurge on the number of visitors, then your website can handle it.

Now the third step is to create a custom website that explains what you do and put it on that space. Similar to having brochures/products/logo on your physical store, this is where you can hire a web designer, such as us :), to look after that part. There are a lot of things that go into building websites and a lot of considerations. A website now is not just a website. A good website is what does the work for you and brings people in without you having to do too much. A bad website pushes out information to the people who you invite and send links to.

The last stage that most companies do not think about when building a website is the marketing side of things. As they where I come from “if you talk you can sell flour, but if you can’t you can’t even sell rice”. Marketing epitomizes this. Its all good to invest in a website, make it the best website in the world. But if nobody knows about it, how are you gonna get return from your investment. So when you plan your budget, it is wise to set a part of it for your marketing. How do you market initially. Basically depending on your budget, here is what you can do

Free

– Word of mouth, tell your friends families and ask them to spread the word
– Submit your website to various directories on the Internet such as Yahoo Directory and DMOZ
– Find other businesses who compliment your business and exchange links with them on the website (but make sure you are not in direct competition). So if you sell paintings, a framing business is great as a partner.

Small Investment

– Create leaflets and leave it in mailboxes
– Business Cards and PostCards
– Email Marketing And so on and so forth…

As I was walking inside the house, outside I saw that they had delivered the new white pages. Properly wrapped in plastic so that it can withstand weather for as long as you decide to take it in. Every year, this waiting time is probably getting longer and longer. Last year I waited a week before I bought it in, only because I needed some weights to hold the hose coming out off my washing machine. This year the same books from last year are doing the job just fine.

The point I’m trying to make is: increasingly, people are not looking at printed material or bulky books when all they need is a small piece of information. Information is so accessible right now especially in Australia. You can look for information on your personal computer, laptop and your mobile phone etc. As we grow more and more familiar with the Internet, the more we are going to look for information online. A day will come when we will refuse to look at anything printed.

What this means for you as a business is that unless your information including your services and your target regions, you will be hard-pressed to find any new customers. That’s why you need a website which is properly formed, clearly identifies you and your services and also clearly displays this information to search engines, so that when someone is looking for you or a service that you provide, you can be found. Your website also works as a marketing and promotion tool. On the next post, we will discuss the different kind of visitors to your site, what they look at and how to make sure that you are properly servicing those visitors.