Planning Your Business Website
If you have determined that you need a website
, what is the next step? Planning. Careful planning in advance can help you to avoid all sorts of problems down the road.Purpose of Your Site
Determine what the purpose of your site is going to be. Are you generating secure online sales of products or information, gathering or disseminating information, asking visitors to join something, communicating with existing customers, generating mailing lists, training, or do you just want a web presence to give your business more legitimacy and make it appear current?
Target Audience
Determine who your target audience is. Build the website for them.
Site Design
Lots of people can build website pages, but it's important that your site be carefully designed. Not everyone who can create web pages can also design a good website.
Site Navigation
Ease of navigation throughout your site is critical. For most sites, access from the home page to every other page on your site is important. A customer won't take the time to go searching for something they are looking for. You have to make it very easy for your customer to find what they are looking for. On the Internet today, it's a well-known fact that if a user has trouble doing what they intended to do, or if pages or images load slowly, the user is very quickly off to another site. Today's Internet users are accustomed to taking care of business quickly, and when they are slowed down by a poorly designed site, they don't hang around very long.
Business Identity
Your website is your identity on the Internet. It must be designed to reflect you and your business. It should be prepared with appropriate colors, with the same color scheme throughout the site. You should create a logo that represents you and your business, something that others will identify as your business when they see it.
Payment Options
If you are selling products or information, you will have to accommodate the purchase process. You may need a shopping cart and you must be able to accept payments. The most common ways to accept payments are with a merchant account that accepts credit card payments from your customers or using PayPal to accept payments. It may take a specialist to attach a merchant account to your site. PayPal is easier to set up, but not all customers have PayPal accounts. You could lose sales if you require payment by PayPal.
Database Connectivity
If you are collecting a list of clients or newsletter subscribers, you will need database storage for those lists. If you are in retail and are selling more than a few items, you'll need database storage for your product inventory.
Thorough planning initially will help to make your website the business tool that you want it to be, and it will save you from many problems later.
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