Starting a business or thinking about closing down due to decrease in revenue? Tired of not having enough sales to make profit? There is a number of new inventions and hi-tech developments that can serve as indispensable cure to a business fatigue. One of such cures is getting your business online as soon as possible and "the right way." What is meant by "the right way" is that simply getting a business website is not going to make magic. The decision of getting your online presence must be carefully planned and properly executed. This post will briefly describe what it takes to launch a successful business website and start generating revenue from online customers.
So, let's presume that John Doe, a business owner, finally decides to try new technologies and create a website to start selling goods or services online. What does John need to do now to make his new plan a success?
1. Register a Domain Name
Well, first of all John needs to come up with and register a domain name for his business website. John should make sure that the website domain name is recognizable, representative of his business' brand and memorable enough for marketing purposes. The domain name is also a critical part of search engine optimization strategy that John will have to implement to promote his goods/services online. It is recommended that the domain name remains as brief as possible, has no dashes and contains keywords related to John's business.
2. Hire a Web Design Company
The next thing that John needs to do is to decide whether he will be hiring a web development and SEO company to help him develop a site or creating his website based on existing website templates.
We have heard it many times that, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." In the world of web design, if you fail to plan, you plan to have a lot of headaches, late nights and missed deadlines while re-designing your website to accommodate the content.
John will need to plan in advance and create a visual outline / diagram / wire frame of all the web pages that he wants to have on his website (e.g. Home, About, Products and Services, Contact, etc.). Once the website structure is planned, John can start writing the copy for the web pages. Writing the copy is a very important part of the project. Good content/copy is a 60% success guarantee for pretty much every website development and SEO project. The recommendation is to keep the content interesting to the public, use distinct and relevant headings, titles and keywords within the body of the text. It is always useful to have the copy ready before approaching a website design company and starting the design process.
3. Work on the Design
After the wire framing is completed and the copy is written, it's time to start the layout design. The layout should be comprehensive; it can either be a 1 or 2 or 3 column structured site or a mix. A professional web development and SEO company can help you design a clean and effective website layout as well as program it into web pages using search engine friendly coding and W3C compliance standards.
4. Get a Web Hosting Account
Once the website has been designed and programmed, John should purchase web hosting (internet space where to put his website), connect it to his domain name and launch his website.
5. Perform SEO
After the website is launched, there is still many, many things that need to be done to make the online business a success. The most critical thing, however, is the promotion and search engine optimization of the newly launched website‚ but this is a separate topic that we may cover shortly.