Planning for a Business Website

So you want to have your own company website? You are not alone in this. Without a doubt there are many good reasons for having one. Reasons like establishing a brand identity, providing product and service information, selling your product and services online, and providing a point of contact for your customers. A well planned and executed website can indeed benefit your business, regardless the size of your company.

Before you jump right into this project, it is important to connect your website to the company's business strategy. If you are going to invest money and resources into having a website, it is essential to be able to see it as a part of your existing overall business strategy. Get the big picture first. Spend some time thinking about the purpose of this website, what role it plays in your business strategy, the cost and resources involved in developing it as well as maintaining it, or how you are going to maintain it. You will be in a better position to judge whether it make business sense to invest your time and resources into this project, whether it will actually help contribute to the growth of your business.

At this point if you have decided to proceed to launch a website, the next step would be to establish specific business goals for your website, setting clear expectations and scope for the project, including the project budget. Without these, it is easy to lose focus. For example, in the middle of the project, you may come across a certain feature on someone else's website and want to implement it (believe me, you will always see new things on other people's website that is 'cool'). This can have a detrimental effect on your budget and time resources. If that new feature doesn't contribute significantly towards your business goals, then it should not be considered. A website can be effective without having too many complex features. Focus instead on building awareness, marketing your product or/and services, and giving your customers or potential customers easy access to your company.

Creating the website is probably the easier part of the process, once you know what you want. To help you think through the process, here is a checklist of things to consider.

Strategy for your website

• Purpose - Write one or two sentences describing the purpose of your website? What aspect of your business needs is this site fulfilling? Is this site contributing directly or indirectly to the profitability of your business? If so, how?


• Goals - List specific goals for your proposed website. For example, easy navigation, quick and easy access to customer service, professional look of the site, secure e-commerce feature, etc. Establish realistic and attainable goals.


• Audience - Know your target audience. Will they be direct consumers or business partners for your products/services? What are the characteristics of your audience? For example, age group, profession, income level, etc. The more you know about your audience, the better focus your website will be to serve them, with better results.


• Size of website - How big do you want your website to be, 10 pages, 100 pages? Set a clear limit for the size and scope of the website. Larger site, of course, will cost more money to develop.


• Static or Dynamic content - A static website offers static contents, usually informational in nature. For example, having pages of product information would be a static content type. A dynamic site would involve interactive actions from your visitors. The content your visitors get is dependent on the information they supply. For example a shopping cart feature for online sales would be a dynamic site. Generally they involve a database in the background, transparent to the users. Dynamic sites generally involve some or lots of programming.

Website Set-up

• Web hosting - To have a web site, you need a web server that is fully accessible from the Internet. You can either have this server in-house or you can contract it out to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) for a fee. The choice you make will depend on your resources - personnel, IT resources, budget for maintaining the website. Both choices have their pro and cons, so be informed of what they are.


• In-House hosting - If you choose to have your web hosting in-house, at minimum you will need the following resources:
  • a fault-tolerant computer for a web server, that can run 24x7, have appropriate UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) in case of power failure
  • the infrastructure that includes a network and a static connection to the Internet, that makes your web server available 24x7.
  • An IT personnel who can maintain your web server, keeping it updated regularly with security patches, resolves server issues, change configuration, etc.


• Using a Web Hosting Company - There is no short supply of web hosting companies, whose sole business is to host your website. And they come with various flavors of services. These companies basically takes care of all the requirements for a web server, and free you up to take care of only maintaining your website. Sounds like a perfect arrangement, but not quite. There are limitation in such a setup. For most small businesses, this would be a viable option. But for businesses that maintain a considerable size operation and already have their own infrastructure, the in-house option would be more suitable. In choosing a web-hosting company, be sure to check around and read reviews about the quality of services provided, their infrastructure reliability. Sometimes choosing the`wrong company could spell endless trouble and headaches.


• Secure Server - Whether you choose in-house or external web-hosting, if you do online sales, it is important to have "secured" server setup. This uses encryption to transmit sensitive information like the credit card information, passwords, etc. In computer terms, you want a server that offers SSL connection for your customers. And for online sales, you will also need to be able to handle credit card payments for the goods you sell.

WebSite Contents

Content is king, as someone would put it. I tend to agree. You can have the best looking website in terms of design and have content that sucks, you will not get visitors to your site. And no visitors is equivalent to an unsuccessful website. So, first spend time to think through and gather the contents, even before you begin to start the designing process. Here are some points to consider:

• What contents to include - The answer to this question depends on your website purpose and your target audience. Focus on providing contents that will help achieve the following strategies:
  • building awareness of your business / company
  • marketing your product or / and services
  • giving your customers or potential customers easy access to your company. For example, providing contact information may be an obvious thing but many websites fail to provide even that. Providing means of customer support and product support, using forums, FAQ, knowledge base, etc.
  
  Ultimately you want contents that your audience is interested in, that will also benefit them. The other thing would be to have fresh contents added regularly, that would encourage visitors to return. If every time a visitor comes back to your site, he/she sees the same thing, do you think your visitors will return for more? Use tools like product news, forums, articles and even blogs on your site for this purpose.


• Categorize your content - After you have collected most of your contents for your website, categorize them. Organize them in major categories, sub-categores, etc. This will help the website designer to create something that will flow smoothly when visitors go through your contents. Always put yourself in the shoes for your audience. A good visitor experience would usually mean returning visitors.


• Programming needed? - Customized programming will generally be needed when you want interaction with your visitors. Eg. You want to serve your visitor with contents based on the inputs they give you. You want to have online ordering, shopping cart, customer feedbacks, events calendar, all these would require some degree of programming to put in place.


• Learn from your competitors - Visit competitor websites and learn from them. What do you like about their site, their contents and what you dislike? What you like, you implement and improve them on your own site. What you don't like, avoid them.


• Graphics - Select appropriate graphics and pictures for your website. Your web designer should be able to optimize these graphics for website display. Have a good balance between text and graphics.


• Use a CMS software - A Content Management System (CMS) can be a good option to explore in developing your website. A CMS allows you to publish and maintain the contents on your website. Once properly set up on your web server, to add or modify contents can be done with minimal knowledge. and some basic training. CMS can also help cut down the development time for getting your website up and running. Some examples of a good CMS are Drupal and Joomla, the two more well known ones.

Site Maintenance

• Frequency - Determine how often your website needs to be updated. Of course this will really depend on the kind of contents you have. Some requires daily update, while others may need to be updated weekly or monthly. Keep in mind that stale contents will not make a good candidate for returning visitors.


• Who does it? - You need to decide beforehand who is going to help you maintain your website. Maintenance involves periodically updating the web contents, adding new features, upgrading web server configuration, patch up security holes, and many more other technical task. If you are reading this article to learn how to set up your website, you probably are not knowledgeable enough to maintain it yourself. If you have IT staff in your company, then of course they would be able to help. Otherwise I would recommend that you outsource the task to a good reliable person or vendor.

Website Marketing

• Promoting your Website - Getting your website up and running is only one half of the story. If nobody visit your website, then all your efforts will be in vain. So once you have your website, efforts are needed to make your website known to the targeted audience.


• How to Promote - Promoting involves making your website known to the right audience. There a number of ways to do that. Registering with the various search engines would be a start. Inviting the right media to review your website would be another way. Buy advertisements, for example on major players like Yahoo or Google. Bear in mind that promoting your website is a continuous effort and not a one time thing.


• Other Tools - There are also other non-online way to promote your website, such as placing the Web site address on all stationery, business cards and brochures. Include the url in email signatures. Wherever you advertise your business in the conventional way, be sure to include the website address.


• Visitor Statistics - You can have statistical reports on your visitors, like how many visitors you have, each day or each month, where are they coming from to arrive at your site, what pages are most viewed on your site, etc. All these are available to you using the appropriate tools that are readily available to you. Especially if you are using a CMS software to maintain your website.

Conclusion

Having your own company website has the potential of contributing significant profits to your business by expanding your market, providing information about your inventory to your supplier, providing customers access to online product catalog and online purchases, and promoting your company. At the same time, if it isn't properly set up and executed, it can be a drain on company resources. Plan your Web site well before you spend money. With good planning beforehand, you can have a powerful tool as part of your business strategy.