Your business DOES NOT need a website to survive in 2010.

By Errol Chung, the LiquidSalesman

OF COURSE YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS A WEBSITE!

We are in the 3rd quarter  of 2010 and 1st graders are going to school with cell phones in case of an “emergency” (such as forgetting a field trip form at home). The website era is here, its free, and almost everyone uses it the course of procuring, marketing and servicing daily business needs. No matter how great your word-of-mouth marketing is, if your business cannot be located in 30 seconds or less on a cell phone or desktop computer, someone else’s will. This is the harsh truth about customer loyalty. Get your professional and informational website up today using a web design consultant without going broke.

Here are a few rules that will help you and your designer’s relationship and save you tons of money, time, and massive headaches. You want to make the consultant’s job as easy as possible and you may actually keep the same one throughout the entire project. The less decisions they have to make, the simpler their job and the more sure you can be that the final product will be exactly what you want. With the amount of web designers available it is cost efficient to have someone build your site for you if you have never done it before or don’t care to learn the entire process.

Rule 1: Do your homework

Leave nothing to chance, design your entire site and hand the documents over to the designer. This can be done in the simple form of an outline.  Visit sites that you believe would have the same graphic elements and layouts that you would like and keep a list of web addresses and the parts of them you want to incorporate.

Site construction:
•       Homepage; This is the first page everyone will see when they get to your site. It should be clean and have a brief explanation of your service; not a million word description of your business. There are other pages for a more detailed explanation. You simply want people to know they are on the right page.
•       Services; In simple, easy to follow Laymen terms, what do you do? A few paragraphs here will suffice.
•       Products; Depending on your type of business, consultation or product based, this page may vary. List your products and services in as much detail as you’d like.
•       Contact Us; Simple add to the point, do not over word this page. Your visitors understand that the only reason they clicked on this page was to contact you. Provide information such as an online form, telephone number, fax number, and/or your address.  Include a map and a picture of the front of your business if you are a physical location and you are all set.

Rule 2:  Budget

Create a budget and stick to it. Do not haggle prices with designers. Designers are professionals with set fees and should be treated as such. A reasonable professional with an office will run you anywhere from $75 – $125 an hour. The good news is that it should not take them more than 2-5 hrs to build your site depending on the amount of information you give them.

If you choose to work with a buddy who does this for fun from his home then you may get away with bringing him a case of domestic instead of imported beer.  There may be some additional maintenance costs depending on the platform you choose to create your site. If you choose to have a unique domain name a simple GoDaddy purchase can run anywhere from $4.99 to thousands of dollars, plus the cost of hosting ($40- $200 a year), plus all of the peripherals they try to sell you. If you build on WordPress or Google Personal Pages, everything is free.

Rule 3: Stay on schedule

Create a timeline and stick to it. Remember that you are a client. You are not asking them for a favor that they can get to when they have a free moment. If the designer states that this project should not take more than a week to complete then hold him to it. Your marketing plan will have a schedule to keep and your site needs to be complete when they say it will be. This is where the importance of front loading all of your information is so critically important. The less the designer has to go back and forth with you looking for answers, the faster your project will be completed.

Rule 4: Marketing

Plan some type of marketing around the release of your website.  Having a website without a marketing plan behind it is the equivalent of setting up an ice-cream stand in the middle of the desert. Though a great benefit, no one knows it exists.

Rule 5: Analytics

Track who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, how long they are staying and what they are clicking on. There is a very simple way to accomplish this. Google has an incredible Analytics program (www.google.com/analytics). Simply create an account or use your existing G-mail login and it will give you a bit of HTML to insert into the bottom of each page. (Your designer will know how to do this.) If you are using a service such as WordPress then all of the analytics will be done for you automatically.

Rule 6: Adjustments

You will want to be able to change your site at random so you can remove what is not getting any attention and enhance what is. If you hire a consultant, do not have them create your site on a platform that you cannot manage yourself. There are tons of free services that allow you to create free sites with a simple point, click and drag. You may need some help getting the core site built but you must know how to manage the minor changes on your site yourself. You do not want to have to wait 3 weeks or fork over another case of Bud-Light because you noticed a spelling error.

Rule 7: Content

Question: How do I generate the right content for all the pages?

Answer:  Steal it.
I offer no apologies in making this statement however, I will explain. These days, time can be your biggest ally or biggest threat. The sooner you can present your idea to the market and back it up with real marketing, the sooner you will begin to profit from it.

Visit other websites that are similar in concept either whole or in part and shares the same business theme as the one you are considering to build.

•      Example: A chef interested in building a website may consider going to a graphic artist, poetic author, and a professional consultant’s page for contextual inspiration. These pages will have terms and phrases that perfectly encapsulate what you are trying to say. Copy the text into MS Word and modify it to talk about your product or service and push it back out. Plagiarism in wrong and you will go to hell for it, however, mimicry is the highest form of flattery.
For more answers to your questions, please visit: http://www.bearintel.com/Income.html