FAQs

1. Your website is your business card to the multitude of people who are online searching for the product or service you are offering.

2. After your customers find your product or service, your website will allow them to contact you easily and quickly you via your channel of choice (email, phone or fax).

3. Your website is accessible to your current and future customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

4. A quality website adds credibility to your business (and badly designed website will hurt your credibility).

5. Your website allows you to introduce yourself to your customers in an image rich and descriptive way.

6. Your website allows business owners to reveal their personal side and or community activities engendering trust and loyalty in their customers.

7. In today’s business environment, ALL BUSINESSES are expected to have an online presence. This expectation will only increase.

8. Your website is an extremely useful tool for answering your customers Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

9. To enhance and extend all printed marking materials with a link to your website.

10. Your website is the cornerstone of any current or future online marketing campaigns

The four easy steps  below will guide you in the direction of a professionally designed, developed and marketed website.

1. Domain Name (URL) Registration — This is the address people will use to access your website (www.yourcompany.com) once you have determined that the URL you wish to use is available. A domain name needs to be renewed every year.
2. Design of the website — This is where the look, feel, and content of the website are determined and created, either from scratch by designing from the ground up (which I don’t do), or by using a pre-built theme (which I do) that is configured to your business.
3. Hosting your website on a Web Server — This is basically where you rent space on a computer that is always connected to the Internet. Price will vary, depending on the amount of disk space you will have and the connection to the Internet, but I use Dreamhost exclusively unless you have a preferred host.
4. Marketing your website — What if you build a website and nobody came? You should be thinking about the marketing of your website as it is being designed and configured. The content of the site needs to reflect the search terms if you want your site to appear on search engines. This area is called SEO (see below).

There are four (4) costs associated with building and maintaining a website:

1. Domain name (a yearly fee around $10 US)
2. Web hosting (a monthly fee) The price will vary depending on how far in advance you pay for your site. Generally if you pay for domain names years in advance (instead of year by year) you’ll get a better deal. The standard hosting cost on Dreamhost is $8.95 US/mth but paid for a full year in advance. They run frequent promotions with various partners.
3. Website Design- This is a one time fee to build & configure your website and make it live online. Prices start from $299 US for the basic 5 page site.
4. Website Maintenance- This is optional as the CMS sites I provide are enabled for you to do your own updates (with a little coaching from me). Beyond that costs extra and depends on how much work is involved but typically I bill an hourly rate.
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Absolutely not. I use WordPress CMS for all new websites exclusively. With just a little training any site owner or their office staff can easily make basic updates to their site while leaving the major ones to me. Of course any knowledge is better than none, but the more comfortable you are using the computer the better. If you can use Word, you can use WordPress.

In addition to a domain name, you need a web host. A web host provides the support for building your web site. Every web site needs to be hosted somewhere. The hoster gives you a certain amount of space for all of your web pages, provides email addresses and other features you may need to build your site. They’re there for technical support; can provide back-up services for your site etc.

There are many ways to advertise/promote your site, but the most effective ways are

1. Referrals- Good old fashioned “Word of mouth.” It’s free and if people can recommend your site that makes it even more credible.
2. Great Content- The more useful and unique you can make your site, the more others will want to bookmark and tell others about it. The biggest mistake people make when building their sites is lack of content.  You just have to give people a reason to return.
3. Search Engines/Directories- The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) and online directories are another great place to promote your site and some of them are free.
4. Social Media Marketing- Ever hear about Facebook? Even Facebook recognized the commercial power of social media and created Business Fan Pages for companies to set up their own profiles and interact with their customers.
5. Email Marketing-  Even you don’t like getting spammed- unsolicited email clogging your inbox each day, but you’d opt-in, i.e. choose who you’d like to receive emails from if they’re of interest to you right? Then obtain your customers’ email addresses and craft campaigns they’ll want to sign up for.
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The easiest way is to use the free Google Analytics. Upon signing up your site you receive a unique tracking code to embed in all your website’s pages. After that, you simply log-on to your analytics dashboard and peruse all the statistics generated from the code- Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Page Views and more.

As blogging is the hottest activity on the internet, you will stand to gain by setting up your blog and using it to do your online marketing. A blog helps bring traffic by increasing its visibility. This can be achieved by securing a high ranking in the major search engines, for instance Google, and with this, you will be able to experience a good volume of traffic to your web site. More often than not, you will receive traffic that is targeted.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

To sell anything from your site, you need shopping cart software. There are many sites (I recommend BigCommerce.com) which offers this service for a monthly fee  with everything you need out of the box and ready to go. All you need to supply are the products and let me configure it for you.

I would highly recommend using a third party site to collect your payments, unless you want to use your own credit card merchant account. The most popular way for many small businesses is Paypal. Simply open a Paypal account and they charge a percentage fee to handle all payment transactions.