Freeman Advertising

If you are a small business owner and are currently adding a website to your advertising budget you may feel overwhelmed with your options. In this article I am going to establish a clear path of options and talk about each choice.

It is important to decide exactly what the site will accomplish. Will it empower the viewer to make more informed choices about your products or simply select a product and checkout?

The following is a list of the most minimal of choices.

1. Will you be selling a product or is the site informational only?
2. Will you be engaging viewers through social networking?
3. Would you like to add a forum or guest-book?
4. Would you like to make remote entries via a password protected page to update data?
5. Would you like to follow website statistics?

If you intend on selling products on your website there are many options. Perhaps the simplest to set up is Paypal or Google Checkout. These apps are embedded in your products pages and the company of choice bills you a very minimal fee for each transaction only. It is a very cost effective way to begin selling online.

The second option is to go through a company like GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions, etc., and the web-master will be provided templates which connect to a few credit card intermediaries. Each one of these intermediaries charge per transaction as well as monthly fees.

Social Networking has taken off. It is a real benefit if you enjoy being part of a seemingly overwhelming flow of information. Your site will benefit from any posts you make on corresponding Facebook or twitter pages.

Pages become dynamic when a visitor does something to make a page change or if there is a feed going into the page, such as a news feed. When the visitors view changes only by clicking links then the page is static.

To make the page more interesting for visitors you may want to add a forum or guest-book. Both of these options will be monitored and edited by the website owner or web-master. If someone submits a post not suitable you can easily edit or delete it.

Another way to make a site dynamic is to add a database entry option. For example if you have a restaurant and you would like to make changes at your convenience you can simply log-on to a page and upload your changing menu, specials, etc. without requiring the services of a web-master.

Wordpress and other blogs are great for doing all of the above. You can select your own plugins and a myriad of other gadgets and create a fully functional site with dynamic content in practically no time. And, Wordpress is an open source application meaning that people are working on it all the time to create a better experience for the visitor and administrator.

Wordpress also allows you to view the traffic information on your site. This information is very useful in understanding how to write copy for the web as you can see how the visitor arrived using which keywords for a page, blog entry, photo, etc in search engines.

I typically use Google Analytics in the websites I create which also supply a plethora of information. I cannot stress enough how important SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is for a website. Web-stats give you a clear picture of who is arriving at your site, when and why.

These are a few considerations when planning a website. In my experience the site will evolve. Not matter how perfectly you plan options will arise that you may have not thought of. Technology is changing faster than most of us can learn it. I can say that getting your website online is one step in an exciting and evolving technology. Good Luck!