Planning for web site success

New web site planning can be an exciting and challenging endeavor. For your commercial web site development efforts to be successful, you'll want to avoid expensive and time consuming mistakes. The following steps are provided to our NetBizWeb visitors in the hopes that this overview will facilitate your entry into the exciting world of on-line commerce!

Begin with a unique concept. What is your competitive advantage? How is your company different? Do you plan to compete on price, quality or service? Do you intend to do a better job marketing than your competition? Focus on your special knowledge, contacts, sources, patents, etc. to give you the edge.

Is your product or service right for the Web? Are your potential customers likely to be on the Web? Are some successful businesses out there doing what you want to do? If so, then we know there is an opportunity for you to successfully compete on-line.

Specify your objectives. What do you want to accomplish with your web site? Possible objectives are:

• Generate leads for phone or email follow-up.
• Enhance company image and branding.
• Generate more traffic to your brick and mortar store.
• Sell products or information directly on-line.
• Showcase your products on-line (saves printing costs).
• Provide on-line Customer Service.
• Expand your market (nationally or globally).

Check out your on-line competition. It's best to use popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Search on likely keyword phrases someone looking for products and services like yours would use. Take notes about competitors’ web sites: name, URL, geographic scope of their marketplace, particular strengths, weakness or gaps in their offering, methods of attracting people to their web site, attractiveness and utility of their pages, etc. This exercise will help you to refine your concept and see new possibilities.

Select a domain name. Look for a domain name which has all or most of the following elements:

• Short
• Memorable
• Related to your company name or core business
• Easy to type
• Hard to miss-spell

Have your web site designer do the actual registration of your domain name. If you plan to use NetBizWeb's design or hosting services, your domain name registration will be both fast and painless. And we always ensure that you actually own your domain name, not a third party.

Why should a prospect visit your web site? What's in it for your visitor? Crawl inside your visitor's head and ascertain the logical and emotional factors that would lead someone to your site. What keyword phrases would they enter into the search engines to find your site? Spend some time on this issue. The success of your web site may depend upon your answer, and the strategy that flows from it.

Outline a rough business plan. If you’ve got a good business going already, you’ve got a leg up. Be conservative about estimating traffic to your site, especially at first. List all the costs you can think of, including the possibility of increased staffing to handle email inquiries, etc. You do not need to develop a full-blown business plan, a rough outline will do. The idea is to get your mind around an overview - and not get bogged down in details.

What about content for your web site? When thinking about content for your web site, remember successful web sites move visitors to make a specific response (i.e. call a phone number, make an on-line purchase, or sign up for a newsletter). New web site owners frequently invest heavily in fancy graphics, thinking a strong multi-media experience will wow visitors into doing business, but they are nearly always WRONG!

Unless your business requires fancy graphics, do not use them. They just get in the way of your visitor's quest to:

• Obtain information.
• Make a purchase.
• Sign up for a service such as an on-line newsletter.
• Send information to your company.

Save your money for what really counts - a clean, fast loading, easy to navigate, search engine optimized web site that effectively moves your visitor to make the desired response! That's how to succeed on the web.

Call NetBizWeb and set up an appointment. By out-sourcing your web project to NetBizWeb your are left free to do what you do best - grow your business. (Not spending days and weeks attempting to learn the intricacies of new software programs, HTML, CGI, Perl, Java, PHP, the vagaries of UNIX and Windows servers, etc.)

Don't be fooled by the advertising claims that software vendors are making regarding not needing to know code. The fact is that "off the shelf" software may be acceptable for building personal home pages, but it is not enough for a serious commercial web site.

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