While trying to establish your web presence, persistence is mandatory. Be prepared to work very hard at growing your Business on the web because you have to build relationships with your customers via a good reputation, and this does not happen overnight. If you have a satisfied customer, more often than not they will buy from you over and over. Things really start with your site, naturally. In this regard there are several steps you must remember: First off, begin with a clean design and make your site as easy as possible to navigate. One method for doing this is to feature a Sitemap. Make it easy to move around your site from every single page. Ease of navigation is very important because if your customers get too confused they simply will not buy and you can forget about ever seeing them again with the all the competition that is present out there. Also bear in mind when you are constructing your site to keep graphics to an absolute minimum so that your site loads as quickly as possible . Research studies confirm that web surfers will not tolerate slow websites. Again, there is too much competition out there for them to be waiting around for you. As a general rule of thumb, the slower-loading the website is, the quicker the visitor is out of there. When you go to review your web stats to see how long your visitors stayed on your site you will be dismayed to discover that they have hit the back button shortly after entering and left skid marks doing it. You will also need to decide who is going to host your site. Reliabilty is a major factor here so I do not personally recommend the free hosts but if you must go with one there are a couple of things you should know. There are now many free web hosts on the web, and each seems to have a certain benefit and limitations to be informed about. I can't really argue there. Some of the completely free hosts like Tripod and Geocities have banners or pop-up ads. You do not get any scripts or database features. Usually I only recommend using free web hosting for personal pages where you simply require a simple, no-frills type website. There are some exceptions but for most home business websites you really require a dedicated host or virtual host who features adequate disk space, bandwidth and tech. support. Having said that, there are numberous free web hosts who are reliable. And I can recommend such sites for "doorway" pages and so on. Just not for an all-out business effort. They are usually automated so you don't have to wait to be approved to have a site up and running. You just need a valid e-mail account, generally. But a negative is that they put a lot of scripts at the top of your html source (for their ads) and this can really screw up yoursite ranking on some search engines, I have noticed. For your first trial site they can be good because they have tutorials and a handy features such as color code programs. If you are on a tight budget I suggest you try one of the many budget hosts that exist on the web. Just type in "budget web hosting" in you favorite search engine and you will get a myriad of results. But do not choose just anyone. Double check their customer service and uptime. Read through their FAQ section. In the last few years hosting packages have gone down in price as competition has increased. So you may be able to get 100 MB of space and 2 Gigs of transfer for as little as five dollars a month. |
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