14.02 – Reviewing What You Can Do Online

Thousands of small companies seduced into having a presence on the internet quickly become disappointed. Part of the reason is that in the rush to put together a website, they end up with little more than an online leaflet or brochure. E-commerce, which is where the real value from being on the internet arises, only comes about when you can buy and sell products and services, just as you can with any other route to market, and equally importantly when you can open up a dialogue with customers. That conversation can be as simple as a strong FAQ section, a blog or an invitation to ask for specific information.

Persevere because the gain is almost always worth the pain. Here are a few of the other benefits of being on the internet for a small business:

» You can have global reach from day one, without the bother of getting a passport, a visa or turning up at an airport.

» You can extend your working time to 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, without creating an enormous wage bill or imposing impossible demands on the few people you have who can deal with sales enquiries or handle customer support.

» Things can change quickly in a small business. If you do business online, you can make changes to your product and service offers or prices quickly and inexpensively and fine-tune your propositions.

» You can reduce human error by eliminating certain stages in each transaction. The more times a piece of information is handled between a customer’s enquiry and the order being fulfilled, the greater the chances are of something going wrong.

Read Stephanie Diamond’s Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies (Wiley) to get thorough insights into coordinating your website with your overall marketing plan.

As well as deciding exactly what copy you want on your website, you need to figure out what the website should look like and what you want people to do on it – whether you just want them to read, or to place orders, get into discussions and so on. At this point, you may well decide that you want a helping hand, so read on.

Deciding on content

The danger with producing content for websites is that you fall into the trap of believing that because it costs virtually nothing to load your site up with copy, pictures, diagrams and videos, you should do so. As I explain in Chapter 10, when it comes to marketing messages, less is best. Think through what you want website visitors to do as a result of arriving at your site – place an order, ask a question, gather more information, see a demonstration and so forth – and then produce the minimum clear content to achieve those goals. Make the content credible, original, current, varied and concise – readers typically ignore content beyond the first one-and-a-half to two-page lengths. 

Information on your site needs to be fresh and informative. Nothing is quite so off-putting as being on the fastest method of global communication known to humanity and seeing an invitation to a seminar that’s already taken place or a special offer that expired weeks ago. You can buy in a news feed covering topics related to your business such as finance, travel or politics, or just general news, to ensure that your front page is always busy and topical, without you having to do a single thing. Check out sites such as LexisNexis (https://bis.lexisnexis.com/uk/news-aggregation), which harvest hundreds of thousands of news articles every day from the most respected news sources and categorise them into categories covering virtually every industry.

If you use this service online from your own computer, you will have to pay to access this content. But if you go to a large city library or a business school library, you should be able to access this content for nothing.

Designing the website

You probably already have a basic website writing tool with your office software. If you use Microsoft Office, you can find free web design tools in the Publisher section of your software. It’s basic stuff, but it gets you up and running. For more on building a website for your business, check out David Crowder’s excellent Building a Web Site For Dummies (Wiley).

You can also find hundreds of packages from £50 to around 6500 that, with varying amounts of support, help you create your own website. Also take a look at these sites:

» Top Ten Reviews (www.top10bestwebsitebuilders.co.uk) provides a regular report on the best website creation templates rated by ease of use, help and support, value for money and a score of other factors. The best buy as I write this edition is available on an indefinite free trial, albeit on a slightly cut-down basis. You won’t get an e-commerce facility unless you upgrade to a plan costing £6.39 a month.

» Web Wiz Guide (www.webwiz.co.uk/kb/website-design) has a Website Knowledgebase that covers topics like page design, navigation, layout and graphics.

More expensive options come with access to an editor, hours of webmaster assistance per month, a domain name, hosting, email and more.

Good website design is essential to having a successful experience online. Here are some website design dos and don’ts:

» Do think about design. Create a consistent visual theme, grouping elements together so that your reader can easily follow the information you’re presenting.

» Do plan your site navigation. Research shows that visitors have to be hooked within three clicks or they jump ship to a more user-friendly website. So, clear signposting is essential, with a simple menu of options on every page and a link back to your homepage so visitors can get back to their starting point. Your pages need to be organised intuitively so they’re easy to navigate.

» Do consider loading time (how long it takes the recipient’s computer to download your data). If loading takes too long, people may leave without looking at your site at all and you may have lost an opportunity for a sale. You can check your website loading time around the world at Uptrends (www.uptrends.com/tools/free-sla-uptime-calculator).

» Do optimise for searching. Build in key words and tags and markers so that search engines easily find your site (see the later section ‘Gaining Visibility).

» Don’t have pointless animation. Many are distracting, poorly designed in terms of colour and fonts, and add unnecessarily to file size, slowing down your reader’s search.

» Don’t use the wrong colours. Colour choice is crucial; black text on a white background is the easiest to read and other colours, such as reds and greens, are harder to read. Check out VisiBone’s website (www.visibone.com/colorblind) for a simulation of the web designer’s colour palette of browser-safe colours.

» Don’t waste your reader’s time. Making readers register on your site may be useful to you, but unless you have some compelling value to offer, don’t. If you absolutely must, keep registration details to a couple of lines of information.

Checking out competitors

To get an idea of what to include and exclude from your website, check out your competitors’ websites and those of any other small business that you rate highly. You can also get a few pointers from the Web Marketing Association’s Web Award (www.webaward.org). Take a look at the Winners section where you can see the best websites in each business sector. Also check out The Good Web Guide (www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk), whose site contains thousands of detailed website reviews.

You can keep track of when and how your competitors change information on their websites by using the services on offer from companies such as WebSiteWatcher (www.aignes.com).

Don’t get into the habit of constantly changing the fundamental layout of your website. Customers may wonder if it’s still you who’s running the show. Customers expect consistency as well as currency when they come to your website.

Using a consultant

Thousands of consultants exist who claim to be able to create a website for you. Prices might start from £499, where a consultant tweaks an off-the-peg website package slightly to meet your needs, or range up to around £5,000 to get something closer to tailor-made for you. The Freeola Web Design Directory (freeola.com/webdesigners) is a free service to find UK web designers. Web Design Directory (www.web-design-directory-uk.co.uk) lists hundreds of consultants, some one-man or one-woman bands, others somewhat larger. You can look at consultants’ websites to see whether you like what they do. Web Design Directory also has useful pointers on choosing a designer.

If you’re working within a set budget, you can consider auctioning off your web design project. Make sure, though, that those you offer the auction to are going to do the job that you need. Using People Per Hour (www.peopleperhour.com), you state how much you’re prepared to pay with a description of the project, and freelancers around the world bid under your price, with the lowest bidder winning.

If you decide to use a consultant to create your website, make sure that he builds it on a widely used platform such as WordPress so that after it’s up and running you can make small updates yourself. Otherwise, you incur further expense and delays every time you want to make a change such as changing a price, adding a product or revising a specification.

Registering domains

Having an internet presence means that you need a domain name – the name by which your business is known on the internet and that lets people find you by entering your name into their browser address box, such as example.com. Ideally, you want a domain name that captures the essence of your business neatly so that you come up readily on search engines, and one that’s as close as possible to your business name (see Chapter 5 where I cover naming your business).

Domain names come in all shapes and sizes. Those such as ‘.com’ exude an international/US flavour, and ‘.co.uk’ implies a UK orientation. Charities usually opt for ‘.org’, or ‘.org.uk’, and ‘.net’ or ‘.net.uk’ are used by network service providers. Businesses often use ‘.biz’, but it doesn’t really matter what domain you use: what you want is to be seen.

Some domains are restricted. For example, ‘.ac.uk’ is used by higher education institutes in the UK and ‘.gov.uk’ is used by UK government departments.

If your business name is registered as a trademark (see Chapter 5), you may (as current case law develops) be able to prevent another business from using it as a domain name on the internet.

After you’ve decided on a selection of domain names, your internet service provider (ISP), the organisation that you use to link your computer to the internet can submit a domain name application on your behalf. Alternatively, you can use:

» Nominet UK (www.nominet. org . uk) is the registry for British internet domain names, where you find a list of members who can help you register (though you can do so yourself if you’re web-aware).

» A world directory of internet domain registries if you want to operate internationally; for example, by using a ‘.com’ suffix or a country-specific domain. Check out ICANN, which maintains a world list of accredited domain registrars at www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars.

» A company that sells domain names, such as Own This Domain (www.ownthisdomain.co.uk) or names.co.uk (www. names.co.uk), which provides an online domain-name registration service, usually with a search facility so you can see whether your selected name has already been registered.

» Free domain that you obtain along with free web space by registering with an internet community. These organisations offer you web pages within their community space as well as a free domain name, but most communities only offer free domain names that have their own community domain tagged on the end – this addition can make your domain name rather long and hard to remember, and unprofessional.

Hosting your website

As well as a domain name, you need to make your website visible to people searching on the web. Doing so is the function of a host, a service that stores all your website pages and makes them available to any computer connected to the internet. Think of hosting as a sort of telephone exchange that makes sure that people can connect with each other.

Expect to pay a monthly fee that varies depending on how much information you plan to put online. Less than 65 per month should meet the needs of most new businesses putting their toe in the water. Fasthosts regularly offers deals such as ‘a free domain for one year, professional email and 24/7 support from just £1 per month for the first year’ (www.fasthosts.co.uk).