Coaching For Success
Posts tagged First Website
‘Tips on Creating a Successful Website’
Jul 15th
Designing Your Website For Success
Online promotion is a great way of marketing, it has come to the aid of many new businesses as well as existing firms. All of them appreciate and try to explore the potential of online promotion. Building your own website is considered as a starting point for any online promotional strategy for a business. Here are a few basic rules which may help you to build a more successful website.
‘The basic webpage characteristics’
No one actually cares about selecting a domain name, but its selection is equally important. You must use a domain name that is short, simple and relevant to your business. Remember, your domain name is your brand identity on the internet, better make it effective. The next step is to decide the look and feel of the website. It includes selecting the colours, the tags, the buttons and the links. The look and feel of a website must be a good user interface which provides easy access to the information and the means to perform various actions. There are online tools available to do this task, so make use of them.
‘The content’
The content should be prepared in such a manner that the reader remains interested throughout while glancing through; right from the title to the conclusion. The related stuff must be grouped together. For example, you can address questions or issues in an FAQ section. Apart from that, the content must focus on identifying and solving a problem that clients are facing, so that the right customers can relate themselves with your offering. Tools like audio and visuals help in making interaction easier. Hence, once you get a prospect interested in your content, it is a start of your long term relationship. Also, don’t forget to follow SEO techniques which popularise your website.
‘The business part’
Once you develop content as per your plan, the next step is to get the customer to purchase your product. You must include the price structure of various offerings you have. The pricing must be competitive and customers must feel that your product or service offers value for their money. Giving discounts is never advisable as it depreciates your worth, so start low and move to higher price band. In order to add value to your proposition, you can club more than one product/services in a single package and use this leverage to delight your customers. And finally, you can provide online order facility to facilitate easy purchases.
‘Building a relationship’
Once a customer makes a purchase through your website, you need to build a relationship with them. You must follow-up to ensure a long relationship develops. The customers must be constantly asked for their feedback and if they wish to give any testimonials about the company, products or services. And while doing all this, keep updating your customer database for future offers and promotions. You should facilitate easy interaction with customers through websites by providing features like autoresponders, online customer service or through regular offers such as newsletters and email.
‘Choosing a website within your budget’
There are numerous options available when it comes to getting a website. Low budget options are – a ‘business card’ types with your company’s product information with contact details; ‘brochure’ type with detailed offerings and free sites using templates. This options give an initial foot in the market but may not necessary be seen as very professional or trustworth. The best options are Content Management Systems (CMS) which require little technical knowledge but allows you to update your site easily and regularly yourself.
All you need to promote your business through a website is to choose an option that is easy for you and produce content useful to your customers’ needs. This simple rule will go a long way in building a large client base for your business.
4 Quick Tips Before Starting Your First Site
Jun 4th
Cpanel Interface
If you have been thinking about making a website yourself and have never made a site before, then there are some basic concepts you’ll want to know. It’s not that hard to make a basic website and here’s are four handy tips.
The first thing is to select a good web host, where the services are done for you choose one that uses Cpanel with Fantastico, this way if you know nothing about how to put a blog, or site up you can go to Fantastico choose the type of site you want WordPress, Joomla! or any other and it will automatically load it for you ( great no tech knowlege required). I’ve tried many web hosting companies and I feel that Hostgator has given me the best service, I have a lot of websites hosts with them and it’s been simple to do, however choose who you feel would best suit your needs.
The second tip is about creating a domain name. It has become more challenging to find a domain name on the first attempt. So you might need to try various combinations by trying to put a dash or try a different extension and alternatively you may wish to add the area your in bakercamden.com to make it easier ( A word of caution many people forget to put hash signs into urls so you really might need to think about a combination without it). You might want to try using prefixes and suffixes with the domain name you want, any good hosting company will have a domain search facility which will then give you options if the domain name you want is already gone.
Fantastico Interface
Now you have a domain host, a domain name and now you need to add pages to it, if you use WordPress or Joomla then it is simple to do and there are many online tutorials to help. Recently it has become very easy to get up and running within a day, you can sign in online to both Joomla! and WordPress and upload stuff, and even email content. Both have free plugins and themes to select from so you can make a web page in no time.
The suggestions above are open source programs which are free and as I said earlier if you have a Cpanel with Fantastico from your hosting company are very quick and easy to get installed (it is click of a button) You can also purchase software if you wish but why when there are so many good ones for free, it is much better to pay for expertise to help get the right look and feel on your pages than for software to create them.
Lastly, in making your first site, don’t get too complex, this is where many beginners fall down. Start off with a basic design and go from there. Once your skill level grows then you can begin getting more technical with the design of the site. Hope this helps the newbies.
