How to build a business website

A recent report by the Yankee Group, a Boston-based marketplace
research company, states that at the end of 2004 around 34
percentage of small and medium-sized businesses in North America
are selling goods and services on the Internet and 25 other
percent plan to do so within the next 12 months. Online sales
in the United States it accounted for 8.4 percent of the country
Gross Domestic Product in 2004. This figure is increasingly
growing. This means that if your company is not paying
pay attention to this vital sales and marketing channel, you are
just miss the boat.

In its basic form, a website is a set of pages filled with text,
graphics and other electronic files posted on the Internet
for people to see. The way you organize your website depends
totally on your goals online. Websites are built for various
purposes You can use a website as a point of sale, marketing
channel, a corporate image building tool, a brand channel,
an information center, a CRM center, a product launch center,
and for various other reasons. When you plan to build a
website, you must base your online strategy taking into account
two things: your online goals and your potential audience.

SOME OF THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF CORPORATE WEBSITES ARE:

Sites that provide information

Most sites today fall into this category. the simplest of them
they are actually mother reflection of offline corporate brochures.

promoter company

The idea behind some of the information driven sites is to give
maximum information related to the company. a holding company,
for example, you may prefer to have a site like this. these sites
usually include: company history, company-related news, mission
press release, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section, etc.
Graphics are used on these sites only to accentuate the text.
information. However, sites may include video and FLASH
presentation too.

Promotion of products or services.

A pharmaceutical company to promote its newly launched
The drug can develop a website around the product. Tea
The sole purpose of these types of sites is to create awareness of
specific products or services.

Create brand awareness

A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively
through the distribution channel you can develop a website to provide
final information about products and create brand. Thesis
the sites complement the company’s offline promotional efforts and
always built in consistency with other commercials.

electronic commerce

Online sales are made through e-commerce sites. Hand
Features of an eCommerce site include:

1. Detail information about products or services with images and, sometimes, with multimedia presentations, drawings, graphics, etc.

2. Shopping cart – so that the buyer can select one or more items to purchase.

3. Payment gateway – so that the buyer can make payments for the products or services purchased.

corporate portals

A website that offers a wide range of resources and services
such as email, forums, relevant company news and articles, members
single area, etc. it is usually called a portal. The portals are
intended to be the gateway for their respective audiences.

b2b exchange

Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where buyers
and vendors come to communicate, collaborate and do business
proceedings. The main objective of a B2B exchange is to create
one place, full of features that allow members to efficiently
carry out business processes over the Internet. A private B2B
Exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace. It is designed
provide services to their own buyers, sellers and
staff.

WEBSITE PLANNING

Before you start building your website, you must first develop a
plan in line with your online goals, target audience and
means. You can write your plan thoroughly as a storyboard.
A storyboard is somewhat similar to a flowchart of all the
components of the website that it deems necessary. Once you are clear
image of what you are going to build, sit down with your developers
and create a technical scope of the project. this is absolutely
necessary! In most cases, your entrepreneurial vision will be
differ drastically with the way a programmer looks at his
requirement.

While working on your scope or even after publishing your website
Keep in mind the following crucial aspects of effective websites:

Loading time of the page
In the euphoria of having a great website, we often use
images that make the pages too heavy. A page that occupies only
one second to charge with T1 speed will need a full 55 seconds to
charge with a 28.8 modem. Internet users are an impatient bunch of
click-happy people; They don’t like to wait too long! Make sure
you optimize each and every page of your website before launch
the place! Otherwise, you will lose a large part of your
potential visitors for nothing!

– Look at your pages from a visitor’s perspective.

– Remove all images that are not so important to deliver your messages. Optimize the remaining images with the available tools.

– FLASH images can be cool, don’t use them just because they’re cool. Use them wisely.

– Host your website on a server with good bandwidth.

Navigation

Your website links must be well defined, persistent and
easily visible. If the site is large with many pages, you should
have a sitemap page. Remember that not all visitors will land
to your home page, in order to keep them browsing through your
make navigation from your main landing pages as easy as
possible. Try to give them compelling reasons to do so using
sticky links. Also, make sure all your links are working properly.
and lead a visitor to the right place.

Website consistency

All your web pages should have a consistent look. this will
give your website a professional look, and visitors while
browsing through your site you will always know that they are still
on your website.

content is king

If you want your visitors to return to your site, regularly
add fresh, relevant and quality content to your website. Internet
users are information-hungry people, feed them fresh information
information on a regular basis and you will have a good number of
loyal visitors to your website.

If you already have a website, make sure to optimize your website
from the user’s point of view. According to Gartner, a market
research company, even a small investment in improving the
usability of a company’s website will yield an annual return of
10 to 20 percent. Increases brand awareness, leads to greater
user adoption rates and possibly more transactions per user.
The average order size starts to increase and the site generates more
return visits from customers.

MEANS

Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed ​​Analysis:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze

Check your web pages for bad links:
http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm

Webmaster Resources:
http://bignosebird.com