Internet - The World Wide Web
Developing Your Web Site

Developing Your Web Site

A Web site is an Internet company’s front door. If a customer cannot get in the door, he or she won’t buy anything. The more planning and research you do before setting up a Web site, the better. Your Web site is the body and soul of your business. It’s the first impression for a potential client or customer, the first thing they learn about you while sitting in front of their computer monitor thousands of miles away. A good Web site invites a customer to walk right in, browse, and ultimately buy something. A Web site that is slow to load, hard to navigate, confusing to follow, or hard on the eyes is like walking into a store to face a hostile or indifferent sales clerk.

Your Web site needs to be good looking, friendly, and efficient. It is the Jack and Jill of all trades, required to do everything for the business. It identifies you, shows off your product or service, tells the customer how to shop, offers incentives to buy, takes the orders, and provides customer service. Many businesses began with amateurish Web sites because the owner thought a Web site was simply a glorified billboard. These Web sites were often prepared by the entrepreneur or a friend with experience in HTML—hypertext markup language—or scripting. Professional Web site designers are often called in to redo a Web site that was thrown together haphazardly to get a business started.

Many of the pioneer Web businesses began before the existence of Web site designers, so they had no choice but to build their own Web sites. They may have been strong on the technology but are short on the visual skills. Web design itself is one of the fastest growing small businesses on the Web for obvious reasons.

RustyZipper.com could not afford the big bucks for professional Web site for their vintage clothing business on the Web, so they learned how to do it themselves. They put up a "Work in Progress" sign and spent their nights learning from books how to produce their own site for less than $1,000. Now it is automated and maintenance takes about fifteen hours a week—five hours for each partner. They pay a service provider about $130 a month.

Keep in mind that the Web site is your most powerful marketing tool. It makes a customer stay or leave. A simple Web site may require only a single page with a nominal cost for a domain fee. The more pages, the more complex, the higher the cost. A custom masthead, navigation system, powered response form, and links to search engines and directories all figure into the design of the Web site. So does shopping cart technology and follow-up support and maintenance.

And there are a whole other set of graphic requirements, such as color, layout, and readability. Custom graphics can be nominal at first and progress with the number of pages and depth of the site.

The cost of putting up a Web site can range from less than $1,000 for a four-page Web site to $2,500 for a 20-page site. The average is around $13,000. With hundreds of pages of data based inventory, the largest sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Today’s Web sites are the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But many sites, full of dazzle, lack the clarity and elegance of those manuscripts. The visitor is overwhelmed by the action but has no idea where to go or how to get there. Less is always more in cyberspace. Make it simple and friendly and most of all, easy to use. It could also be fun. After all, the Internet is also entertainment and many surveys have shown that more people are watching their computer screen online than are sitting in front of the TV set.

Remember that Web surfers have a short attention span. If they don’t like your site, they will click off to another one.

* Source The Best Internet Businesses You Can Start
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