What do I need to consider for my Website?

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This question is important to consider. Proper planning can provide better results and lower expenses by reducing wasted effort.

Who do I want to reach with the website?

It may seem obvious but have you thought about your target audience for the website? If you don't know who you are trying to reach, you won't find them. "Build it and they will come" only works in the movies.

What do I want to do with the website?

• Catalogs of merchandise - You may want to put catalogs of merchandise on or, if you have a lot of items, in a searchable database. You can also setup on-line stores where customers can browse and select items to purchase.
• Documentation - Do you want to provide on-line documentation which can reduce traditional publication costs (like printing and mailing catalogs or policy updates).
• Profiles - You can offer information about what your company does.
• Biographies of the service provider or artists - You can provide biographies of key people in your organization as a "selling point".
• Information Gathering - You may want to setup polling and opinion/data gathering through interactive forms.
• Magazines - You may want to make an electronic copy of an existing publication or an original version of periodical information ("e-zine").
• Special Interests - You may want to put information about a special interest and become a destination to find out about it.
• Education - You could setup training information, course work, and interactive testing ("e-learning").
• And many other ideas are feasible.

What are the objectives and goals?

What is the website to accomplish? For example if you know you want the website to reduce your postage and printing costs, how many viewers and how many printed publications do you want it to replace?

Having a set of goals to meet objectives is so important and necessary to reduce the wasted effort of creating something not necessary or required. Wasted effort costs time and labor.

What are the necessary technical arrangements?

Have you checked on the registration and support of a domain name?

Setting up a domain name requires choosing a name that makes marketing sense, the potential customer can remember it, and the name being available. The fee varies and and is free with our hosting packages. We recommend you make an appointment with us and learn about the details - through our resellers agreement, we offer a hosting and domain registration package that is very affordable and include one free year of domain registraion and hosting with our design packages.

Have you checked on hosting for your Website?

To have information available to the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 24x7x365, requires having computers on all the time and expensive leased communications circuits used all the time. Your website can be economical to operate because it resides on the host machines or premises and shares the resources. To that end, arrangements for recurring service fees should be investigated in advance of your needs.

Have you considered outsourcing all or part of the Web page creation and publishing of the Web pages?

Depending on your time, patience or skills, you or a friend can create the site yourself, or you may want to obtain the services of someone who does it for a profession (and be happier with the end results). Some persons would rather work on their own car, others pay the shop even if they know how to fix it. If your site does not need much complexity doing it yourself may take time but will be educational. If it needs only minor corrections periodically you may want to have a professional set it up and then you can make the minor changes. Of course, if you have custom programming for a database, you'll need professional service and support). You may decide you can better spend your time generating revenue in your specialty and then pay someone to make the website and still be ahead. These are things you will need to decide when budgeting. We can work with you to do all or part of your website.

Have you reviewed the potential costs for registering the domain name, creating the Web pages, and hosting the website?

You may want to ask yourself if the costs associated with Internet marketing return more than they cost. If your goals and objectives can reduce expenditures for traditional marketing (save postage and printing, answer questions 24x7, etc.) then you should proceed. If you are depending on the website to produce new revenue consider whether the costs are acceptable. You can compare the costs of websites with traditional advertising as a guide. Also, consider there are marketing costs AFTER the website is published and live.

How often will the website need to be updated?

Websites do get stale and fresh content is needed to keep traffic coming to your site. Do you want to do the updates yourself or do you want to outsource the updating?

What information is relevant to building the website?

Gather past print publications and electronic copy.

You can save a lot of effort by not reinventing the information that already exists. Also past effort can help suggest future efforts. Find pictures, brochures, newspaper articles, or advertisements. Find examples of your competitors. When possible get the electronic version to save the labor costs of having the information rescanned and typed.

Break up your information into main topics.

Like writing a book or manual with topics, having the information arranged by topics on the website makes sense. The time you spend organizing into topics will make the website better and reduce wasted effort.

Think about how you would organize and navigate the information.

With the information arranged in topics you may have a good idea how you would navigate the information.

• Hierarchies - Many websites are hierarchical. They may start with a main (Home) page which branches out like a tree.
• Linear - Some websites are in sequence like a book, one page follows another.
• Linear with Alternatives - Some of the pages of a Linear site could branch off and jump (link) back again.
• Combination of Linear and Hierarchical - This is a popular way of setting up a website. It's like have the information descend from the Home page like a tree but the top branches connect to each other.

What will my website look like?

This activity is very important. Without a storyboard it is likely unnecessary labor and resources will be consumed to make the website!

Create a rough outline of what your website will look like.

A simple approach is that you can draw squares and arrows linking the squares on a piece of paper, like an old flowchart. Put some notes in the squares. The squares could be the topics. Some squares might be: Introduction, How to Contact Us, Products, Services, Frequently Asked Questions, and About Us. Another way is to use index cards. Or you could use a presentation application to show the concepts (like PowerPoint).

Think about what topics will go on what pages
Think about how you would have the pages link to each other
Think about the Introduction or first page and what it needs to provide to the viewer (some readers judge whether to read the rest of the site by the first page).
Review the goals and objectives of the website. Go back to the storyboard and have the storyboard reflect the goals and objectives of the website.

How will I promote the website?

Just because you build a "field of dreams" does not mean that people will buy (or even visit) it. They have to know that you built the "field". Helping people locate the website, promoting, takes labor and resources. A lot of marketing books now have sections devoted to Internet marketing. Consider the following:

• Traditional Advertising - Put the address of the website, URL, on all your publications, business cards, advertising, billboards, radio, letterhead, and send letters and faxes to customers letting them know about it, and so on.
• Search Engines - Get listed on search engines. Getting a good listing take effort and time. We can offer suggestions and offer services to do this.
• Internet Advertising - You may want to consider getting special interest websites to advertise and hyperlink your site.

Caution: Be careful about the temptation of advertising with unsolicited e-mail ("SPAM") because it is unwanted and will void almost all contracts with Internet Service providers (including us). We will not do business with any business that uses unethical, immoral, or illegal practices.