A website image should match a company’s quality objectives to build your company’s online presence. Does yours? The truth is a poorly designed website can damage a company’s online presence. More so, your website is your online presence. Internet users expect a reputable company to have a high-quality online presence reflected in a quality and professional website. Think about it as an electronic business card or brochure; a first-class website shows that a company is serious and professional. A website that is well presented, designed and developed will open a myriad of options for low-cost marketing and client acquisition.

This is the first segment in a three-part series that addresses the guidelines on how to plan, present and develop your company’s website. The full series includes:

• Professional Online Presence
• Quality Web Site — Quality Approach
• Website Design, Development & Marketing Aspects

Your Company’s Web Site ? Professional Online Presence If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company’s products and services. From now on, consider your website as an extension of those products and services; consider it as your company online presence. Ask yourself what is important to you and your customers when it comes to the services or products your company provides? Is it the advantages like quality, performance, presentation and reliability that are offered? Does your current web site reflect this? Revisit your company’s mission statement ? is this also reflected in the website?

It’s amazing how many companies do not have a professional online presence for fear of expense (in which case, they often opt for a “do-it-yourself” product). A well-developed, well-designed website is not a cost; it’s an investment, and any related expenses will convert into new clients. At present, there are several reputable organizations that will help your company build an effective web site for a reasonable price.

It is proven that R.O.I is quickly met when the website properly addresses your requirements and /or target market. Keep in mind that your website is the least expensive 24/7 (worldwide) salesman that you will ever find.

It’s important to find a team of website design experts who will listen to you, understand your needs, and not only follow your guidelines, but also present you with new options and suggestions to increase your sales and customer acquisition. A good team will produce a professional online presence that is in tune with your company’s image, excels in usability and is search-engine friendly.

Online marketing for your website is also very important since your utmost goal is to attract users that search for the products or services you offer. A high-quality website that is lost among search engines is like placing an expensive ad in a magazine that nobody buys. If Web browsers cannot find your site, they are limited in how they can purchase your product or service. Treat your we site as a marketing tool, not only as a source for company information.

Summary: A professional online presence and a quality website are the most important investments you will make for your company; it will reflect your company’s image, and the products and services you offer. Seek a website design company that is willing to learn about your company, and its products and services. Get involved in the website development process and offer your opinion and suggestions ? after all, you know your market and your company.

Carla Reis
President
Quest Quality Solutions
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Copyright 2005 – Quest Quality Solutions.
This article can be reproduced in its entirety, if the author credit is retained and there is a prominent source link to www.questqualitysolutions.com.

Carla Reis has a Bachelor Degree in Arts and a Diploma in Web site Design; she also has several years of experience in Web site design training, Search Engine Optimization, and management. Carla’s experience with Web site design and Search Engine Optimization [SEO] began when she was the training manager for one of the biggest Search Engine Marketing companies in North America. She developed the company’s training manual and SEO certification exams to better qualify the staff and deliver high quality services to the company’s clients. After managing the training department and organizing the working flow and distribution for the company, Carla decided to venture on her own. She started her company in 2004 ? Quest Quality Solutions. What began as a one-person business has expanded to a team of professionals and has been growing in a steady pace.

Your Companys Website Professional Online Presence published at Start a Business Building Websites

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QUESTION:
Should I build and maintain my business Web site myself or pay someone else to do the work for me? — Wesley L.

ANSWER:
When you say, pay someone else to do the work for you, Wesley, I am going to assume that you are talking about hiring a professional Web site designer to do the work and not your next-door neighbor’s teenage son. If my assumption is correct, then read on. If not, go ahead and flip over to the comics section. You will get no good out of the advice I’m about to give, so you might as well consult Dilbert for your hot business tips.

Should you build and maintain your business Web site yourself or pay someone to do it for you? Let me answer your question with a couple of my own. Number one: is building and maintaining Web sites the key focus of your business? Number two: could your time be better spent doing more important things like, oh I don’t know, say running your business? If your answers were no and yes, respectively, then you have no business building and maintain a Web site.

Remember this: every minute you spend on tasks that are not related to the key focus of your business is time spent to the detriment of your business. In other words, every minute you spend focusing on tasks that do not contribute to the growth of your business and thereby increase your bottom line is time wasted.

If you want to be a web designer, be a web designer. However, if the key focus of your business is building widgets, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your time would be better spent building widgets, not Web sites.

Case in point: I once had a very wealthy dentist ask if I could teach him how to maintain his Web site so he wouldn’t have to pay me to do it. Now my teeth had helped put this guy’s kids through college, but that didn’t seem to matter. At that moment he was more concerned about having to pay for changes to his Web site than my personal oral hygiene. Sure, I said, I’ll be glad to teach you how to update your Web site, just as soon as you teach me how to clean my own teeth so I don’t have to pay you to do it. He got the point. And he charged me enough for the cleaning to keep his site updated for months. Smart man.

Many business owners think they can’t afford a professionally designed Web site and that simply is not true. While the old adage, “you get what you pay for” is never more true than when applied to Web site design, having a professional web designer do the work for you is money well spent. A well-designed Web site can bring you a many-fold return on your investment. You can’t say that about too many other collaterals.

While it is best to leave Web site design and maintenance to the experts, it is up to you (or someone considered a subject matter expert within your company) to provide the designer with the content (text and photographs) that best conveys your company’s message to your customers. A Web site, no matter how well designed, is meaningless if it lacks the content required to interest customers in the products you sell or services you provide.

Here’s are a few questions that, once answered, will help ensure that your Web site’s message is as appealing as its design. Go over these points with the designer before the design process begins as the answers will help determine the direction your Web site’s design should take.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Web Site?

Most business Web sites have two purposes: (1) to educate the consumer and, (2) to sell them products or services. If you sell shoes, for example, the purpose of your Web site is to educate potential customers on the quality and durability of your shoes and as a result, to sell them shoes. If you paint houses the purpose of your Web site is to educate home owners on why your services are superior to other painters and sell them on hiring you to paint their house. By defining the purpose of your Web site you will give the designer the information required to create a Web site that best conveys that purpose to your target audience.

Who Is My Target Audience?

Your target audience consists of those folks you want to attract to your Web site: potential and current customers, future and current employees, possible investors, etc. Anyone who might be interested in your company and its products or services is a member of your target audience. Correctly identifying your target audience is vital since your Web site should be designed specifically to appeal to your target audience.

Put yourself in their shoes (or in front of their computers). Imagine your Web site through their eyes. If you were visiting a Web site such as yours what would you expect to find and what would you be disappointed not to find? Identify your target audience, then have your Web site designed to fulfill their needs and surpass their expectations.

What Content Should My Web Site Feature?

Your Web site content should be driven by the nature of your business. If you’re a real estate agent, your site should feature photographs of homes you have for sale and information on buying and selling a home. If you own an auto body shop, your site might feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. Remember to determine the purpose of your site, then develop the content to serve that purpose.

What’s My Competition Doing?

The last question you should ask is one of the most important: What is your competition doing on the Web? Do a Google search for similar businesses and click around their Web sites. How are their Web sites designed? What message are they trying to convey? Are they doing a good job of conveying that message and as a result, selling products? What do you like about their Web sites? What don’t you like? Make note of the things you like and the things you hate, then share your findings with your site designer.

Remember, you’re not stealing trade secrets here.

You’re just borrowing ideas.

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim’s latest books include “Small Business Success Secrets” and “The 30 Day Blueprint For Success!” Related Links: http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Maintaining Your Business Website published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Having spent a number of years in the internet design and marketing industry I have seen how important the balance of web design / optimization is to the success of any e-marketing venture.

In the past I have had clients who were frustrated by the fact that competitor web sites ranking high in the search engines were of poor quality compared to their own.

When I looked into this it was obvious what was happening. The so called poor quality sites were composed of simple navigation and then lots of pages with text and an odd image here and there. The clients web site in comparrison was an all singing / dancing mix of flash and bright graphics. The text in the site was limited to a few lines here and there.

Here was an excellent example of two web sites built at different levels. One was basic and probably built by someone at home while the other was professionaly built by a designer. In my mind I was in no doubt that the professional site would probably sell more than the basic one. The only catch here was that the professional site was nearly invisible to the search engines due to the nature of its design and content. A great looking site that no one can find.

Had the web site been built with optimization in mind then it would have probably had far more success. Just because a web site needs to be optimized does not necessarily mean the design has to be sacrificed. There are many ways a web site can be made search engine friendly and still look and function professionaly.

When a visitor arrives at the web site then first impressions really do count. A business does not have very long to promote itself so its important that any visitor is given good reason to stay and explore other pages. This is when clever marketing and copywriting take over from the initial optimization.

If you are thinking of having a new web site built then think very carefully about how it’s design / content will influence its’s position in the search engines.

If you have a high ranking but poor looking site then consider adding some enhancements that will not affect it’s current position.

If you have a site that is extremely search engine unfriendly then consider having it completely re-designed.

Marketing Advice

The best things in life are free so I give this information at no fee.

Getting The Balance Right published at Start a Business Building Websites

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The latest craze sweeping the webmaster world is creating ‘Adsense Websites’. Webmasters are busy cranking out a number of websites aimed to earn entirely from Adsense, with few of them finding the success they hoped for. Creating Adsense Websites is a wonderful idea provided you play by the rules. Creating spammy websites with hardly any content and a whole of links based on ‘high-paying keywords’ is more likely to get you banned from Google Adsense than earn you high profits you dreamed of.

A small content website created on a specific theme with Adsense ads integrated properly into it, is the correct way to earn from this revenue model. How to logically create a new website based on Adsense Revenue Model is discussed here:

1. Identify High-Paying Keywords

The first step is to decide the theme of your website. Since you are creating a website entirely for Adsense, it might help if you first took time to find out the highest-paying keywords/ads. Advertisers bid for keywords on Google. Some keywords are very expensive and if ads for such keywords are displayed on your website, and clicked upon, your earnings may increase dramatically.

For a list of High Paying Adsense Keywords, visit http://www.momtycoons.com/earning/adsense-keywords.shtml

> To do your own research, use http://www.iotaweb.org/. Type in the desired keyword and the tool will tell you the highest bid on it.

> If you have a Google Adwords Account, log in and use the tool for finding the bid rates for different keywords.

Choose a topic which is fairly high-paying as well of your interest.

2. Build an SEO Website with Useful Content

Once you have chosen the theme topic, start building your website. Register a Domain Name, Set up a Web Hosting Account, choose a simple and fast loading layout for your website and add start adding content. Add at least 10 articles on the topic you have chosen. You can get the articles for free from an Articles Directory but it is best to put original content into an Adsense website. Write the articles yourself or Hire a Content Writer.

Optimize all pages for Search Engines. Use Heading tags, proper titles and keyword-rich content. The more SE optimized your page, the more relevant will be the ads that are displayed.

3. Integrate Adsense Seamlessly

Add Adsense code to every article page. Take time and choose ad formats depending upon your website layout and integrate the ads seamlessly within the content on each page.

Read more about integrating ads seamlessly in your website content at http://www.momtycoons.com/earning/integrate-adsense.shtml

4. Increase Website Traffic

Your website is now done and you need interested visitors to visit your website, read your content and click on your high-paying ads. Start promoting your website by submitting articles, using signature tags, link exchanges etc.

Lata Tokhi is the owner of Mom Tycoons: http://www.momtycoons.com, a website with useful articles and advice for webmasters on topics such as starting online business, setting up websites, marketing and promotion, increasing revenue and sales, search engine tips etc.

Creating A Website Based On Adsense Revenue Model published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Steps to be followed in website development and Marketing

Keyword Research

Before one goes for the website development one should always do some research work on Keywords.

Why Keywords?

Keywords are analytical part of an website which helps in bringing up the site in search engine rankings.

It can be difficult to choose the Keywords that describe your business so that users will see your website when they perform an online search. How do you go about it? This article offers some useful tips.Obviously, you want people who are searching for what you can provide to find your website near the top of those results pages. How do you manage this feat?
The easy answer is “by using keywords and key phrases.”
The tricky part of that answer, as you might have guessed, is that you need to use the right keywords. choosing the wrong keyword would do no good from search engine point of view.

Choosing and researching good keywords is a process that takes several steps. I won’t have the room to cover all of the steps completely in this article, so I will cover the rest in a subsequent article. Basically, the process goes through four stages:

• Collecting initial keyword ideas.

This is also known as brainstorming. Come up with plenty of ideas; ask other people for ideas, too, including your customers. In this article, I’ll discuss some do’s and don’ts so you can target your ideas a little, and maybe even come up with a few you wouldn’t have thought of originally.

• Checking keyword research tools.

There are online tools that offer information about the number of times users perform searches for specific words. This is very important, because it will help you not at all to optimize for a keyword the search engines never see. Two of the best-known keyword research tools are Wordtracker and Overture.

• Selecting keywords.

This is the point where you put the information from your research together and decide which keywords are going to deliver the best performance for you. Note that I said “performance;” the best keywords might not be the ones that will deliver the most traffic.

• Analytics.

After you’ve chosen your keywords and optimized your site, you need to perform measurements to see whether it’s delivering the amount of traffic and conversions you expected. You can use this information to make adjustments and refine your keyword strategy.

website development and marketing is a hot topic to discuss but here one finds quite a few ways how to deal with it. For more information you can find on site: Website development

Four Ways Of Keyword Research published at Start a Business Building Websites

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In the time that I have been using the Internet, (since 1996) I have seen a lot of websites. I have seen a lot of good websites and I have seen a lot that were just plain awful. Here are some things to think about before you start a website.

What is the purpose of your website? Is it meant to be primarily a sales site or is it meant to be purely informative?

Once you have decided on your website’s purpose, you need to decide on a theme. There is nothing worse than going to a website and having to play guess what this website is about. To pick a theme, I suggest that you write down a list of things that you are interested in and/or knowledgeable about.

Once you have written your list down, you need to do some research. Use a tool such as the search term suggestion tool on overture to see if there is a demand for your topic. If you type in your topic and see a lot of searches done for your topic then you should use that topic. If you don’t see a lot of searches done for your particular topic, try another one.

Now that you have picked a topic that is in high demand, you need to either develop a product that fits the theme of your site or find a product to sell that fits within the theme of your site.

You also need some sort of freebie to offer on your site so that you can build your own opt-in list for marketing purposes. You should offer an ebook or a special report. Maybe even offer an e-course. Whatever you offer, make sure that you have a way of capturing the email addresses of your visitors. These people will become your “warm market” or people that you can market your other offers to.

You will need to find a hosting company to host your site. Free Web space is fine for just casual websites, but if you are serious about making money online you should eventually graduate to a paid host. The reason behind this is that many people perceive a site hosted on a free web space to be unprofessional. I don’t agree with these people myself, but you do have to deal with what the majority thinks in this industry.

You also need your own domain name. See the above tip.

You will need to code your site. You can either learn how to do this yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you. The amount of money you have to spend on this endeavor should help you to decide whether or not you want to hire someone.

Lastly, you need to figure out how you are going to promote your site. Here are some suggestions:
writing free articles for reprint in ezines and on websites.
buying advertising in ezines
buying advertising on websites
trading links with relevant sites.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of things to think about when starting a website. This article’s purpose is just to get you started. You should certainly read everything you can find about doing business online while you are building your business.

Copyright 2004 by DeAnna Spencer
This article may be reproduced and redistributed freely on the Internet as long as the resource box remains intact.

DeAnna Spencer is a virtual assistant that helps entrepreneurs run a successful business by providing affordable administrative help. She also publishes a blog for small business owners. Visit this small business resource today.

Things To Consider Before Starting A Website published at Start a Business Building Websites

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In today’s day and age just about every company has to have a website. It’s widely accepted that if your company doesn’t have a website, it’s not considered credible in its market. Yet how many companies actually consider their website to be truly an online sales tool? In fact most companies spend a lot of money to design and build fancy websites but they neglect to think of how they’re going to turn the website into a work horse for generating leads and online sales opportunities for their company.

Most business owners and executives don’t understand that even if they’re not engaged in selling a product through an e-commerce system, there’s still a great vast opportunity to increase their lead generation through guerilla marketing techniques related to internet marketing. And the core competencies in that area are performing good search engine optimization and having strong pay per click advertising campaigns that are focusing in your core markets.

85% of business buyers go to search engines to find vendors when they don’t have a preferred source, so it’s absolutely critical that you have an online presence and that you are well optimized with your website so that when people type in keywords related to your product or service you come up at the top of the search engine, whether it be MSN, Google or Yahoo. From there once a person who’s searching for your product or service clicks through to your website, what do they find? Do they find a nice “about us” page, or a pretty picture of your company? Or do they find readily engaging tools, free guides and offers that compel them to actually click on an offer and fill out a form and convert themselves into a sales lead.

Companies that are building websites without thinking about optimizing them for the search engines and without thinking about optimizing them for conversion of sales leads are entirely missing the boat. If your company is in the process of building a new website or redesigning its website and it’s not considering search engine optimization and developing great offers and conversion mechanisms in calls to action on its website, my suggestion is don’t waste your money. It’s not enough today to just have a nice piece of brochure-ware that does nothing. Companies that are really winning with their marketing expenses as it relates to web presence are the ones that understand the power of internet marketing and are turning their websites into workhorses for sales.

About Cube Management

Cube Management delivers sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions (whether recruiting, interim management or consulting) that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Download the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide and the Cube Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.

Make Your Website An Online Sales Tool published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Analyzing the Website Audience

The webmaster should analyze his prospective audience in light of the message he is attempting to convey. You must be concerned with the range of ages represented in your visitors, the education and experience of this audience and their knowledge and opinions on your main theme.

You must adapt your website as specifically as possible to the audience that you are trying to reach. You will need more than a superficial knowledge of your target audience. What are their intrests, are they educated or uneducated, are they experienced or inexperienced, what are their opinions and prejudices and what is their economic and social level.

The webmaster should never fail to consider the emotional state of his audience. Establish a common ground of feeling. You must analyze and utilize their motives and intrests if you are to relate what you have to say to their habits of thought and feeling. To do this you must know as much as possible about the behavior and needs of the people who will be visiting your website.

Often, the subject of your website will give you a hint as to the character of your visitors. If they are intrested enough to visit your website then you can expect that they have an intrest in what you have to offer. Understand your audience in terms of the trends of the day as revealed through newspapers, magazines, broadcasts, the movies and web surfing. Compare the customs, standards, traditions and manners that you possess with that of your target audience and create a common ground with them.Define and Refine

There are 4 steps, that if followed, will define your target audience and refine your site to meet their intrests. They are;

1) Investigation – Consider the purpose of the website, the layout that best projects the idea that you wish to convey and characteristics of your prospective audience. List possible topics and select the one best suited to all aspects of the situation: your intrests and qualifications, the requirements necessary to promote your ideas, the necessary content to accomplish this and the expectations and characteristics of the audience.

2) Organization – The next step for the webmaster is to determine the structure of the website. The webmaster must decide the logical requirements of the subject matter and the most appropriate way to adapt it to the prospective audience. Only after a webmaster has selected the topic, has analyzed the particular audience, and has collected the proper content will they be equipped to plan the structure of the website.

3) Method of Expression – The third step in building an audience friendly website is to express the thought in a way that will communicate to your audience exactly what you intend. The central theme should be easy to follow, the vocabulary must be suited to the understanding of the audience and be interesting enough to hold the attention of your visitors.

4) Mastery of the Content – You must master the content of your website and present a logical sequence of ideas leading to a particular goal. Set up your website in such a way that there is a smooth progression from one idea to another. Make clear the exact meaning of what you are saying each step of the way.

Gene DeFazzio is the webmaster of http://www.rocketface.com. Rocketface(R) Workshop is an attempt to gather together, in one place, information on how to design a website plus a few of my own thoughts. Every attempt has been made to eliminate technical jargon and buzz words.

Importance Of Website Audience Analysis published at Start a Business Building Websites

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The Internet is what I consider one of the most awesome things every created. I am of that generation that grew up with computers and the Internet has really been a god send for me as it allows me access to places and people I would never have had the opportunity to meet. It is also the source of some of the best information you could ever wish to garner. But! It is also the source of some of the worst information as well.

Website owners, just like you and me really need to carefully look at the material that we provide on our websites and consider the issue of whether everything we are providing is really what our visitors really want. So, the question is, how do we find out?

There are four simple key strategies you can use to find out whether the visitors to your site actually value your information. The four strategies are ?

1. Email the Visitors
2. Survey the Visitors
3. Put Feedback Ratings on the Page
4. Email to Friends buttons

These four strategies might seem obvious or simple but how many people actually use them. Not too many.

Why Put These Strategies Into Place?

The key reason for this is that by understanding what your customers are thinking you can tailor the information on your website so that they are more inline with what they want. For example, and I will use my own training company as an example, if we had let say a sudden rush of 10,000 visitors to our site and they told us via the four strategies above that they wanted more information on Excel, what do you think we would do. We would add more information on Excel. If through the Feedback ratings we got higher positive responses for say articles on Pivot Tables, what would we do? We would put more articles on Pivot Tables onto our website.

Let me give you another very clear reason to do this. My team and I run a website in Townsville, Australia called GetTheRightPrice.com. This website provides the fuel prices for the local community and tells them where to get the best price. For three years my company had been running this site to the tune of $100,000 plus a year. We had struggled to work out how we could run this site and make a profit. Over the three years we used some of the strategies above to learn one clear lesson. Nobody in the community was prepared to pay for the fuel price, which meant we had to change our way of thinking to find a model that worked.

Okay so let’s look at the four strategies.

Strategy 1. – Emailing Your Visitors

This strategy I personally think is quite simple and straight forward, but it does rely on one thing. You need to be asking your visitors what their email addresses are. If you own a website and you aren’t collecting visitors details, then what are you doing. Remember one thing, always ask your visitors their first name and their email address so that when you send out an email, you can address the email to them personally. You will always get more responses if you address the visitors by their first name.

One other thing, get the visitors details into some sort of Customer Database as soon as possible. There are lots around.

When you email your visitors you could ask them simply some questions to reply to, you might ask them to complete an attached survey or you may just ask them to give you some feedback on say a certain webpage.

One thing to note too, sometimes people can be very shy about completing a survey via email. You may want to consider finding a way, with this strategy where they can reply, but anonymously.

Strategy 2 ? Survey the Visitors

This is one, I have been using a lot of late and I have learnt so much about my customers. You can survey the visitors in two ways, have a link on the page that takes them to the survey or you can use what we call an Exit Survey. This was a strategy I learnt from a series of interviews done by a gentleman called Mr H. There are about 5 hours of discussions on how to really make an effective website in these interviews. An exit survey is where a screen will popup as they leave your website and done effectively is a really simple way to learn what your customers think.

I thought when I first used it people would be really anti the technique, but they haven’t been and I have got some really cool information from my customers. One thing though, if you are using Pay-Per-Click search engines, then they usually frown on this technique. But, if your traffic is from other websites then I encourage you to use this technique.

Note a few things though, for this method to work, the questions must be extremely simple and quick and to get the optimum responses back you need to make sure that you offer the visitor something. In particular some Free Gift like an eBook, article or report and make it something worthwhile not rubbish. Nothing irritates me more, than registering for something free and it being a load of rubbish. If you do this, it will affect your credibility.

Strategy 3 ? Feedback Ratings On Your Webpage

Feedback ratings are definitely what the big boys are using. If you visit sites like MSNBC and go to their news articles, at the bottom of each article you will see the ability to define how you rated this story and they give you five stars to click on. With this sort of information what you can do is to then look at the styles of articles you are providing and provide more in that category. This will ultimately help you to attract the customer back in the future.

The other key thing with this style of tracking is that you can work out if a particular author or style of article is more attractive to your visitors. It can also help you work out whether its worth paying to get a key author to write for you.

Strategy 4 ? Email This Article To Your Friends button

This strategy is really an extension of Strategy 3. What it essentially requires you to do is to track how many times somebody forwards your article to a friend. By looking at the statistics from here, if a certain style of article is being emailed then you may again want to look at getting more articles in that category.

What’s the bottom Line?

The bottom line is this, the more you learn about your customers behaviors, what they like, what they don’t like, who they are etc, the more effective your website will become and the more likely people will come back to your website.

The other thing I would like to put to you, is not to lose your statistics. You need to be looking at them regularly. In our centre we use Microsoft Access to view and evaluate our statistics. Trends change in the marketplace and what works today may not work in the future, so by keeping those statistics you will be able to see if the trends are changing.

Chris Le Roy is the Managing Director of One-on-One Personal Computer Training and has been training people in building websites and using the Internet through his company for 10 years. If you would like to listen to the interviews mentioned in this article click on the link ? http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp

Four Strategies On Finding Out What Visitors Think Of Your Website Information published at Start a Business Building Websites

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One of the phenomena of the Web is that it all looks so easy. After all, it just takes some typing, a few graphics and a link here or there to create a web page, right?

But it’s more complex than that when you’re serious about doing business online. In fact, it takes a TEAM to create a profitable online business. So who is on your web team?

You, the business owner, are an important part of the web team. You are the person who sets the direction. And you ensure that direction is followed. Just because you are not technical does not mean you should compromise your vision. Stick by your guns and have the technical staff set it up to your standards.

Your Web Designer. He or she is a professional who combines both artistic and technical skills. They may choose to outsource the graphics or the programming, but their specialty is ensuring that your site looks good and functions properly. Your web designer may only create your site, then leave the maintenance to someone else in the organization or they may stay on for the maintenance role. You definitely need someone who can create new pages, add links, and respond to the changing environment of your online business.

Most web designers are not Internet marketing experts. You or the Internet Strategist need to tell the web designer what standards you want applied to your site. You are the manager of the process. The designer works for you. Even if they think a fancy graphic would look good, you should ask them to refrain, unless you know it will enhance sales.

Your WebMaster. This person makes sure your server is running properly and that all of the backend services that your web designer depends on are operating properly. Your webmaster may be the same as your web host, depending on the complexity of your site. In some cases your web designer may also be your webmaster.

But never assume that all of these roles are being done by a member of the team. Instead, ask if they will perform specific functions. What is not being done can hurt you more than what is being done.

Your Internet Marketing Strategist. This person understands how business is done online. She understands your business goals and sets out a plan to ensure you are able to achieve those goals online with your website and the marketing activities prescribed. The strategist looks at every aspect of your information assets that can be turned into information products or free offers, as well as at your website. The strategist may be a one-time investment or it may be someone you work with regularly.

Your Internet Marketing Team. These are the people who do the activities included in your strategic plan. These activities may include registering your site, marketing your articles, creating link exchanges, and running your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. This role may be done in-house or outsourced. But it is one that is ongoing.

Regardless of whether or not you’ve ever outlined all of the activities that are involved in creating, maintaining, marketing and profiting from a website, they do all exist. And if you’ve been wondering why it just doesn’t seem to be “happening” for you – it could be you’ve left out an important function and/or member of your web team.

Copyright 2006 Jeanette Cates

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet Strategist who works with independent professionals who are ready to turn their knowledge and their websites into gold. Dr. Cates offers a one-time Brain Dump Special for online business owners seeking guidance. http://www.YourInternetStrategist.com

Whos On Your Web Team published at Start a Business Building Websites

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