E-commerce and technology

Jul 7 2005 By the Evening Gazette

A website is a relatively low-cost way for a small business to promote itself to existing and potential customers.

The technology allows you not only to advertise your business and what it offers, but also to perform transactions online.

What do you want your website to do for your business?

There are at least three key areas where a website can support your business activities.

It can generate sales by:

- Creating a dynamic company image.
- Promoting your products or services.
- Advertising current deals and special offers.

It can provide information through online versions of:

- Catalogues and price lists.
- Product specifications.
- Instruction manuals.
- Technical updates.

It can act as your online shop by:

- Taking orders and receiving payments.
- Improving efficiency for customers, allowing faster response and turnaround of orders.

Your site may be designed to achieve some or all of these functions, but remember it does not totally replace more traditional methods in any area.

To function successfully, it has to:

- Be visible, which usually requires additional expenditure on supporting advertising in print media.

- Earn a high rating when people enter the generic name for your product or service into their choice of search engines.

- Give customers and potential buyers a reason to return regularly.

What are the main options available?

The options are to employ an outside professional service or to follow the do-it-yourself route.

Nearly everyone can build a website. There are plenty of short college courses that will give you an adequate grasp of the 'language' of the web - hypertext mark-up language (HTML) - within ten evening lessons.

There are inexpensive software programs available like FrontPage, which are no more difficult to use than a wordprocessor. Basic website layouts are supplied in the form of templates, which you can customise to your purposes

However, a professional designer will speed up the process for you. With adequate briefing and close co-operation from you, they will generally be able to build a professional and original website that achieves a far better result with regard to:

- Accurately reflecting your business with an appropriate webstyle.
- Easy and logical navigation.
- Fast loading speed.
- Suiting the capabilities of all web browsers.
- Achieving the purpose, such as providing accessible information or facilitating successful purchasing.

How much will it cost to set up?

This depends upon the size of your website and the number and complexity of products and services it offers.

For a fairly simple promotional site, but with a more tailored design, prices start around £500 and go up to many thousands of pounds.

This is not unreasonable, bearing in mind the designer has to do some thorough homework to identify your needs before quoting on the actual design.

There may even be a free preliminary sketch or two thrown in to illustrate ideas before you accept the quote.

The development costs will increase as your functionality requirements grow, e.g. if you want to allow customers to interrogate a database of information on your site, or conduct financial transactions.

Your Internet service provider (ISP) may levy a monthly charge for hosting your website, which will vary depending on the services being offered.

There is also a fee of £35 plus VAT for registering your domain name, but this reduces if you are registering domain names in bulk. Registration is important as the domain name is the unique name that identifies your website from others.

This registration fee has to be paid every two years to keep your registration current, or you can lose the right to your domain name.

What is involved in maintaining a website?

It is absolutely essential for the information on your website to be complete and up-to-date all the time.

To provide its full potential, your website must be available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Most web designers will, for a small monthly fee, offer a monitoring service to check on this on a continuous basis and rectify any faults.

There may also be many indirect costs involved in maintaining a successful website.

If you have set up an e-commerce site to sell products online, be aware that potential, but basic, problems include:

People who purchase over the web because they don't have time to get to the shops also don't have the time to wait at home for randomly timed deliveries requiring their signature.

Many people prefer to handle and examine a product before purchasing.

Some people don't like to provide their credit card details online.

To overcome such problems, you may have to be prepared to deliver after working hours - or find a carrier who will. You may need to have a manned telephone ordering operation where customers can read out their credit card details to a person.

And you will have to offer a returns policy where the customer is entitled to return, at your expense, any new goods within a stated time limit - without having to give any reasons at all.

Other considerations?

Before you discuss your site with a designer, there is research you can do by yourself:

Look at competitors' websites. What do they offer? What do they lack?

What is unique about your products or services?

Analyse websites that work well for you. What are the features that make them easy to use? How did you remember them? Why did you return to them to purchase?

Note the navigation features, layout and graphics on any website that especially appeals to you.