You can design a website yourself, however if you require to be found in the search engines or you cannot produce the correct quality of design seek professioal advice.  

 

Hiring a web company can be a nightmare. Obtain a service that gives you a fixed-price deal for a set number of pages. 

Keep connected 

Make sure your site can be easily found and navigated around: 

• Ensure the right keywords to help search engines find you are embedded in your site’s page titles and ‘meta tags’ 

 

• Include’ hotlinks’ to related sites in return for links to yours 

 

•Give visitors a mechanism that lets them go straight to the areas that interest them 

 

• Include an index, menu bar and internal search form on your home page 

 

• Include navigation links to the main areas of your site from every page 

 

Start with the essentials: 

 

•What is your product? 

 

•Who do you sell to? 

 

•Why should visitors buy from you? 

 

•What are your prices? 

 

• Provide the most up-to-date information you can 

 

• If you are selling online, make it easy to buy 

 

•Offer after-sales support, with tips and FAQs 

Organising your material 

The web is a dynamic medium. Change and update your content often: 

 

• Changes to your home page signal to visitors nthat there is something new to see on your site 

 

•Give visitors immediate payoffs - news, offers, or key information they will want 

 

Make it simple 

 

People expect quick answers on the internet. They will get impatient if they cannot find facts easily: 

 

•Keep pages uncluttered for clarity and short downloading times 

 

•Offer text links/navigation as well as image/graphic links as an alternative for fast visitor access 

 

•Only use a search facility if the site has the number of pages to warrant it. Otherwise a simple site map (index) will do 

 

•Only use techniques that are appropriate - visitors may not have the hardware and software needed to enjoy animation or live video feeds 

The business advantage 

E-mail can offer an effective and flexible tool for low-budget marketing: 

 

•With the right list, you can reach customers anywhere with no delay, no print bills and no distribution costs 

 

• Your message can be sent to hundreds of people around the world for the cost of a local phone call 

 

• Your e-mail can be precisely targeted - it goes direct to a named person’s desktop 

 

• E-mailed newsletters and mailing lists can be developed to give regularly updated information and build customer loyalty 

 

• Target new customers by renting e-mail lists - only use lists where people have specifically agreed to receive unsolicited e-mails about a certain topic (these are called ‘opt-in lists’) 

 

Use it to promote 

Develop a website as part of the ‘marketing mix’ to promote your company and its products: 

 

• Involve and encourage visitors to return by inviting feedback through questionnaires, offers of e-mailed bulletins and e-mail reply links 

 

•Make sure all of your traditional advertising, i.e. brochures, includes your web address 

 

• Take every legitimate opportunity to build your own e-mail database by capturing addresses from visitors to your website and normal enquiries 

 

• Search engines are how 80% of people start looking on the internet for a product or service - you can’t underestimate their importance 

Measuring response 

As with all other forms of promotion and marketing, measure and analyse customer response: 

 

•Monitor the number of website visitors who convert to customers - it is easy to create a large volume of traffic, but it is better to create a smaller number of relevant visitors with a high conversion-to-sale ratio 

 

• Track visitors to your site 

 

• Examine which keywords visitors use to find your site and amend your site accordingly 

 

•Use hit analysis software and make sure your ISP maintains an access log with full visitor details - use these records to identify which of your pages are most popular, when and where visitors come 

from and which sites they visited before yours 

 

• If you are pursuing exports, analyse the location of visitors to your site and adjust to cater for them, i.e. use visitor’s language/list local distributors 

 

Tread carefully 

Sending unsolicited e-mails to unwilling recipients can get you into serious trouble: 

 

•Regulations require that you obtain recipients’ prior consent before sending commercial e-mails (excluding addresses you have obtained in the 

course of a sale or negotiation for a sale) 

 

• You must provide an easy opt-out mechanism in your marketing e-mails so that recipients can easily remove themselves from your list 

 

• Your advertising must comply with Advertising Standards Authority rules