There is no straight answer to this question. It surely depends on how you design your website and what you use it for. It can be anything from a simple window into your business, where you explain who you are and provide some contact information, to a complex system that becomes the backbone of your company and you cannot live without. But let’s go step by step and consider the possibilities. Many people just don’t imagine what they can get with a website. If you’re one of them, read on and you will find some answers. If you do know what a website can do for you…read on too! You may find new ideas.
The simpler version of a company website would be a bunch of institutional pages: a home page where you welcome your visitors and tell something about what you do. Then a page with the company history, and a page with contact information. If you sell products, you should include pages displaying them, with pictures if possible. This simple website will not require much maintenance, and will lead new customers to you, people who wouldn’t find you otherwise.
Moving one step forward, you can take your institutional site and add a newsletter service. So your customers, or other visitors to the site, sign up to receive a periodic email with information and news about your company. This allows you to know who is interested in your business, and offer them solutions and products. Plus, it helps generate loyalty. You will be making an effort to stay constantly in touch with potential customers.
Another step you can take is offer support to your customers in your website. It can be anything from email support, a tickets system or live chat. Whatever suits you and your business. You could also implement a forum where customers can post questions and answers, thus creating a community of users. If you sell products that have print manuals, you can generate PDF versions of these manuals and have them available on your website for download.
Then, a bigger step. You can move part of your business to the web. For example, you can enable a form where customers can submit quote requests. Or include a shopping cart to directly sell your products. These are only some of the possibilities, which in fact are endless. You must think about your company in particular, and what you think would help you. If you travel often, a password protected tool where you can enter and view information from any computer may be handy. If you have salesmen all around the city, or the country, a password protected tool where they enter the orders will help you collect the information.
Once you decide you will have a website for your company, you need:
-someone to create the website: a web designer, and also a web programmer if you plan to have something other than a small institutional site. Unlesss you can create it yourself using a site builder tool. Sometimes, the same person is designer and programmer.
-a domain: this is the internet address of your company. You need to register it. For example, www.your-company.com . Once you register a domain, it is yours until it expires, and you can renew the registration before expiry date. Domains can be registered for a year, or two, or ten, for example. You pay an annual fee which decreases if you register for several years at the same time.
-a hosting company: this is the place where you will host your website, where it will be kept so people can reach it. You need to choose the hosting plan that is adequate for your needs. There are lots of hosting companies, with all ranges of packages and prices. If you have a small website, you do not need a fancy hosting plan, just something simple will do. It is important that the hosting company is serious and reliable. If you’re creating a business website, don’t host it in a free server. It won’t do good to your image. You will find hosting plans are not expensive.
This has been a simple description of what a website can do for your business. If you still don’t have one, you should seriously consider it. If you already do have a website, think about what you have and maybe you will want to make some changes or improve it. It will always be a good tool to help you grow.
Business refers to at least three closely related commercial topics. The first is a commercial, professional or industrial organization or enterprise, generally referred to as "a business." The second is commercial, professional, and industrial activity generally, as in "business continues to evolve as markets change." Finally, business can be used to refer to a particular area of economic activity, such as the "record business" or the "computer business"
A website is the entire collection of web pages and other information (such as images, sound, and video files, etc.) that are made available through what appears to users as a single web server.
There are very few businesses these days that don't have websites, and as a home business your website is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. A good website can really work for you, but you need to know what you're doing.
Web design really is something that you shouldn't try to do yourself, unless you really know what you're doing -- I'm sure you've seen what happens when people try this. Hiring a web designer, though, can be prohibitively expensive. Luckily for you, the Internet puts you in touch with designers all over the world, and it's easy to hire one of them very cheaply to design your website. They don't do any worse of a job than someone in your country would, it just happens that your few hundred dollars is worth as much to someone in India as a few thousand would be to you or I.
When you have a website, you're not just trying to reach people who were searching for you -- you're trying to get people to check your website, read your latest news and offers, and the rest. The best way of doing this is to have fresh and useful content on there. Write short articles about the kind of things your customers might be interested in. If your home business is computer repair, for example, you could keep track of the latest virus threats on your site and offer help to anyone affected.
One of the simplest ways to have fresh, useful content on your site is to keep a weblog (or 'blog'). A blog is a series of entries, like entries in a diary, that are displayed on your site starting with the most recent first. It is easy to log in and quickly write a new entry, and it can be as short or as long as you like.
For your home business' blog, the only rule to stick to is not to post anything there that isn't related to your industry and your work. It might be great that you've got a new baby or sad that your cat Mr Tibbles died, but you should start a personal blog on another website if you want to post about that kind of thing.
One of the worst mistakes people often make when they're starting a website is to think that it would be a good idea to give their customers a 'contact form' to fill in. People really, really don't like filling in forms, and you'll lose a lot of interested customers if you require them to tell you all sorts of things before you'll even talk to them over the Internet.
The best thing to do is to simply list your email address on your site, as a clickable link, and advise customers near the link of the kind of information it would be useful for them to include in an email. It might sound strange, but people are far more willing to go to the trouble of typing things in when it's on their own terms, and not into an annoying web form.
Both Veronica Bendersky & David Mclauchlan are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Veronica Bendersky has sinced written about articles on various topics from The Internet, Web Development and Site Promotion. Veronica Bendersky is a Systems Engineer specialized in web programming and online systems. You can reach her at hosting company.. Veronica Bendersky's top article generates over 4400 views. to your Favourites.