| |||
Practical Advice on starting a web business
Building Your Site for the WebWhen starting an online business, the way you build your site is critical to how successful it will be and how appealing it will seem to your clients. Design, site content and client functionality are the most important factors that you should consider when building up your online business.Design Most people think of eye-candy when hearing the words “site design”. However design means much more than a flashy banner or a colorful navigation set. Site design undertakes concepts like cleanliness, loading times, navigation, accessibility and of course basic design issues like color schemes, navigation buttons, banners, flash objects and so forth.Cleanliness is the way everything is organized on your site, the way text is positioned in paragraphs and the use of relatively compatible colors. A clean blue-white color scheme for example, will have a much more positive effect than a color scheme containing 4 or 5 colors that make your site look like a candy shop. Offering a clear paragraph structure, rather than a huge block of ideas also generates the impression of “clean”. Designing your site (especially your homepage) with slow Internet connections in mind is also crucial. Several studies show that the average web surfer will click the “back” button of his browser if the website he is trying to access doesn’t load in a maximum of 20 seconds. Thus make sure that you keep a balance between banners, ads and images on your site, since these occupy the most space. You should try to avoid making your homepage bigger than 100 kilos, but this upper limit applies to the other pages on your site too. Navigation and accessibility are critical for an online business. People want to go fast to where they want to and they want a direct link for it. Make sure your navigation buttons cover all the important pages of your site and make sure the four most important buttons of a business site are present: Contact Us, About Us, Shopping Cart/Services and Home. These four buttons offer quick ways of navigating to the most important parts of your site and should be placed both in the upper part of a site and at the end of each page. ContentYou can have the most fabulous design, high-quality products sold at low prices, but without content your online business won’t make a lot of money. Why? Simply because content is the most important factor that search engines use to rank a website (next to the external linking process). A high search engine ranking means more traffic, more traffic means more products sold or more services used, which in turn mean more money…it’s simple mathematics.A keyword is a term that your whole site is based around and a word that you think will most likely be used in a search engine by possible clients and users of your services. For example if you conduct an online car business, your keywords will probably be some of these: best cars, cheap cars, buy cars, car brands, etc. Keyword and keyphrase density is an important factor that search engines look after when indexing and ranking your site. A good density will boost your rank but make sure you don’t spam the entire site with keywords, as search engines (Google especially) have strict rules about this sort of unfair practices. Usually try to have a maximum keyword density of 20% of you site’s total content. The way you organize your content is also important. If you have a 10-page article on your site, don’t make your clients scroll ten pages all the way down to read it. It’s better that you break the article into 10 equal parts and put each one on a different page, with links to the first, last, previous and next pages. This way your content will be more organized and user-friendly and it will also create a wider internal link system on your site, which is important for a higher search engine rank to some extent. Client FunctionalityNothing says “Amateurs!” to your site, more than a bad functionality. Bad links, missing pages or empty ones will earn you bad grades from your customers. To avoid this, check your site thoroughly before uploading it and promoting it and make sure your business functions (online shopping, orders, shopping cart, business information, business newsletters, etc) all work properly and there are no glitches to the system. Your clients needs to feel comfortable and safe in using your online services, so site security and the ease with which clients can order products or services are both equally crucial.None of these three factors can be considered “the most important one”, since all have an equal share in making your site appeal to the customers or to the search engines. If you think you can’t manage one of these factors on your own, it’s best to hire a professional that can do it for you (web programmers for functionality, web designers for design and professional writers or ghost-writers for your content). Combining them will guarantee a successful, ongoing, profitable online business. Finding a Suitable Hosting Plan for Your E-commerce SiteOnce you finished designing and structuring your online business’ site, the next logical step is to upload it on a server so it can be accessed from the Internet. Finding a suitable hosting plan for your site is not always an easy job, since there are thousands of hosting companies out there, each offering different services and features for different costs. The following article will try to explain some of the most popular features offered by the vast majority of hosting companies out there.The most important features you should look for when ordering a hosting plan are the physical server space offered and the site traffic amount. Physical server space means the actual amount of Megabytes you will receive for uploading your site on. A basic site shouldn’t normally exceed 10 MB, although if you store a lot of movies, mp3’s or high-resolution pictures on the site the amount could drastically increase. Most hosting plans offer 100+ Megabytes of server space, which is more than enough for 9.9 out of 10 websites. Watch out however not to be tricked into buying a plan that has less space than you require, although this is an improbable possibility. Site traffic is the actual traffic that comes in and goes out of your site: downloads, uploads, movie streams and so forth. There are different offers around this hosting component, some companies offering a set number of Megabytes each month, each year or on a daily basis. Others offer limitless site traffic, but this sometimes comes at the cost of other hosting features. Depending on how well your business site develops, you can change your hosting plan to one that offers higher site traffic, in case the download/upload rate exceeds it. A plan that includes 20 Gigabyte of site traffic is usually enough, although there are several hosting companies that offer a larger number of Gigs. Two secondary features included in most hosting plans are e-mail accounts and sub-domains. You can create a set number of e-mail accounts with your specific domain name inside them (for example if your domain is called www.your-e-biz.com, your e-mail accounts will have the following format – Dan@your-e-biz.com, Mary@your-e-biz.com, etc). The hosting company either limits the number of accounts you can create or if the plan you ordered is a special e-mail plan, the number could be unlimited. You should always consider saving a few accounts for your website’s service e-mail, client support e-mail and product information e-mail. Sub-domains, also called third-level domains are a great way to store secondary services or data from your website. To give you an example of how a sub-domain looks like, we’ll take a look at www.yahoo.com, which is Yahoo! Inc.’s primary domain. Its sub-domains include mail.yahoo.com or music.yahoo.com, which contain secondary services or information. Sub-domains are not really essential for your online business, but they are a nice bonus you could get from the hosting company. Try to get a hosting plan that has at least 3 sub-domains, because you never know when you will find them useful in the future. Other basic services that you will find with most hosting plans, include 24-hour FTP access to your account, SQL databases you can use to store client, product or service databases, PHP/Java/Perl/CGI support, or access to the server’s logs. Asking the server administrators on their security systems is always a wise thing, since you wouldn’t want someone messing around with your site’s products, just because the hosting server was not fully protected. Last but not least, a critical element that no hosting plan should miss is traffic reports. In order to keep track of the number of visitors and general site traffic, you could put a traffic counter somewhere on your site, but the professional web design community considers this addition unaesthetic. It would be best if you could avoid traffic counters, so a weekly or monthly traffic report coming from your hosting company would be extremely useful. You can use the traffic information to plan your future sales strategies or you can locate problems in your advertising system if the numbers are too low. Depending on your needs and budget, you should search for the perfect hosting plan, with the above components in mind. There are thousands of hosting companies eagerly waiting for you to contact them, each offering diverse services and features. The Internet is full of hosting sites so you will waste little time before you find a plan to your liking. Make sure the company you choose is a professional one and that it can offer non-stop services and uptime guarantees. How to Hire a Web DesignerWhen starting an online business, your website is the center of your commercial universe and it is your direct connection to your potential clients. The importance of a quality website is extremely high and building it is never an easy job. Although the old saying states that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”, when it comes to commercial websites this is quite hard to follow. You must be skilled in several domains to build a business website yourself, including web design, web programming, web marketing, or online transactions. In most cases it will be hard, if not impossible, to do all those things yourself, either because of the lack of time, lack of knowledge or lack of skills. This is when you have to hire a web designer. Finding the right man (or design company) for the job involves a dedicated searching process. Make sure you take all options into consideration and that you don’t plunge in headfirst on the earliest offer. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the web designer shows you a flashy website that he did or some eye-candy banner that he made for another site. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the right man for the job. Look for someone that can design a professional, clean, attractive site rather than someone that can make art-like or candy shop sites. The latter will be of no use to you, since you don’t want to offer your clients a color show; your purpose is to sell and to offer your clients a clean, easy way to buy or take advantage of your services. The designer should come up with templates, or at least ideas, on how the site should look like and you should both work with each other in building the perfect site that you imagined. Communication skills are crucial for every web designer. You can’t just tell him to make you a website and then come back after a week or two to take the final product. A constant communication stream must be opened between you and the designer and he must regularly show you how the site is improving. Don’t hesitate to correct him or guide him on how you want things set up on the site. He won’t take it as interference to his work; actually the designer is bound to be quite thankful for your suggestions as his work will be much easier if knows exactly what you are after. If you already have the design and want to add functionality to your site, you need to hire a web programmer (although in most cases the designer will also be the programmer). Make sure he understands the exact function he is creating and that he has a good background in web security. When dealing with e-commerce, security is of top priority so look for someone that eats encryptioned data for breakfast. Also test the ordering or automated processes after he built them, to make sure there are no glitches and to avoid the possibility that he might have left something out. Price is also an important factor when hiring a web designer. If you choose to go with a professional company, results might be higher, but so will be costs. Hiring a freelance designer will save you some money, but you might end up working with a 15-year old that might not have the required experience to complete your project. Either options include some risks and costs, but you will most likely get better results from hiring a company to do the job for you. You know what they say; you get what you pay for. If you are lucky enough however, the freelancer could prove to be an unemployed design genius (and yes, there are a lot of them out there) and he could do a quality job for a price 6-7 times lower than that of the company. When it comes to cutting up costs, nothing is better then offshore outsourcing. If you are an American, the concept should be familiar to you. Offshore outsourcing means hiring cheap workforce from less-developed countries that offer the same quality jobs as local design companies or freelancer, only at a much lower price. In a recent study, almost 80% of American online companies worked or are still working with offshore designers or programmers, so this might be a viable option. Remember the most important factors that come into play when hiring a web designer for your online business: communication skills, price/quality balance, resume and professionalism. Once you have decided on what you are looking for, search the Internet for the designer that suits you. There are thousands of companies waiting to work for you and even more freelancers looking for a job at a reasonable price. Using PayPal for Your Online Business
The sole purpose of an online business is to sell products and the ways you can sell are becoming extremely diverse. One of the most common paying option, next to direct credit cards, is PayPal, an international service that offers a direct electronic payment method. All you need to have in order to use PayPal to conduct online transactions is an E-mail account and a bank account number; PayPal will do the rest. PayPal is free to use but it will charge a small fee on online transactions. This cost is well worth it though, because of the comfortable, easy way to use its services and the high-quality, state-of-the-art security system that PayPal employs. A small set-back however, could be the fact that PayPal is not present in every country and you can only send payments in a set of currencies including: Canadian Dollars, Euros, British Pounds, U.S. Dollars, Yens and Australian Dollars. This is only a problem if your online business is based outside the 56 countries that support PayPal. Credit card acceptance is always an issue with an online business, but PayPal offers both a viable and a comfy solution. Supported credit cards include VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, eCheck and of course, PayPal credit cards. In addition to credit card transfers, you can use almost all other major forms of payment, which means you can pay through bank transfers, debit cards and much more. PayPal offers 4 powerful plans in order for your site to accept credit cards. The first and most common of the four plans is the “Website Payment Standard”. With it, you can integrate PayPal to your shopping cart, in order to provide your customers with the option to pay securely and easily. This plan is used by numerous e-businesses all across the World Wide Web and is a popular choice for sites that have a less complex trading system. The second PayPal plan is the “Website Payments Pro”. This all-in-one solution gives customers the possibility to pay through their credit card, while staying on your site for the duration of the transaction (you don’t want your customers to surf through dozens of links and sites before finally being able to pay). During the process, PayPal is invisible so it will feel like an internal transaction process integrated on your site. The third plan is called the “PayPal E-mail Payments” and it features billing your customers through their e-mail, so they can pay as soon as they receive your bill. This is useful if you have a large list of clients that you want to bill at a fixed date. The advantages of this plan include its speed (your customers will be able to pay with a click of their mice once they get the bill), its efficiency and its low-cost (since you receive payments without any additional taxes, account fees, setup or monthly fees). The last plan is called the “PayPal Additional Payment Option” and is mostly aimed at businesses that want to increase their sales and their user-friendliness by offering a different approach to credit card payment. For example if you already have direct credit card payment options on your site, it might be a good addition if you have an alternative PayPal option, since many users prefer its simplicity over other payment methods. 70 million people have PayPal accounts so you can attract them if they prefer PayPal as a secure and convenient way to pay. And of course, the plan offers additional security, anti-fraud and chargeback protection systems, which might be more appealing to some of your customers. PayPal has quickly grown to be one of the most used payment plans on the Internet, because it is so easy to set up and because it offers great features that other payment methods miss out. Being the number one payment method on E-Bay! has earned PayPal an even greater popularity than before. Its high-security and user-friendly features made millions of sites around the world rethink their payment strategies and replace their older, more rigid ones with PayPal. Integrating PayPal on your e-commerce site is easy, once you choose one of the four business plans provided. Your sales are bound to skyrocket and transaction and hacking problems will be avoided. Always remember that it’s best to offer your potential customers several payment methods, either because they got used to one of them and will prefer it, or because they simply won’t be able to use some of them, in which case you will lose important sales. Available profitable web businesses. Review Designer Web Topics: Introduction |
Introduction Sites
of interest
|
||
|
|
|||
