coming-soon.jpgOkay, you have just decided to go out for yourself and start a business. You have carefully researched your market. You know what your competition looks like and you know what kind of demand there is. And you’ve even put in a marketing budget. But then it hits you – you haven’t even thought about an online presence. The options can really be daunting when you look into them. But, with a little help, we can clear through all that clutter and arrive at some good options.

If you are opening a storefront or ecommerce you probably already have an ecommerce solution for business. You usually start with having an online store in mind when you go that route. But, if your business is a typical brick and mortar business, you probably haven’t considered an online presence as much. The first thing you are going to need to figure out is what you want to do with your online presence.

Online Brochure

This has been the typical approach to having a presence online. It is a static page or pages and it usually only conveys basic information. This could be things like contact information, bios, history, etc. This has some value.

Information Dispersal

This kind of site typically has static information but with a twist. It also offers industry information pertinent to the company. This keeps the site dynamic, the search engines coming back, and maybe customers as well.

Dynamic Customer Portal

This kind of site gives your customers a piece of the action. It offers them a login to a portal where they can view inventory, check pricing, and get support. This one is much harder to implement, but can bring some real value to current and potential customers.

And here are the basic pieces that you will need to get started:

  1. Buy a domain name or website address. Think of this as buying your online real estate. Now, you will soon learn that a lot of domain names are taken. Just search through a bunch to find what you can. We’ll discuss some ideas about domain names later.
  2. Buy your business web hosting. If you are building a simple site, then you could easily go with the economy hosting package. This is for light traffic sites with little space requirements (under 5GB). It also comes with 500 email accounts. Check out the hosting page above for details on our other packages.
  3. Build a web site. You can also opt to look at our website tonight package. This is an easy to use web site builder that can get your site on the internet very quickly. Or you can opt to pay a designer to make a site for you.

That’s the quick and short of getting your business site online. If you are going to do ecommerce, we also have packages for that if you haven’t decided on one yet.