The British Business Online!
You may come across GBBO – an initiative by Google, Enterprise UK, BT, e-skills UK and many other partners to help small businesses create their first website and understand the opportunities presented by the Internet. This is a very good scheme to get you started – for nothing! Initial free hosting, web design – the whole works.
Now, it's good if you have the time and inclination to get everything up and, mostimportantly, maintain your website. The easy part is setting your site – get yourself a template, domain name and a hosting company and you're away. Or are you?
Yes – you are! You will receive your website up and running – but will anyone in this great network to visit your site?
And this is where the average business owner needs help. To get visitors to your website requires a lot of work setting up your keywords, metatags, links, and back. Regular analysis of yoursite's visitors (if any) provides a wealth of information targeted customers and markets to help. All of these are better considered at the initial site-development stage. So, if you made use of the free website service and then sit back and wonder where your visitors are, you will need to talk to a web design Company. It is almost certain that they will have to take you back to square one to start a new website designed to systematicallybuild the best structure, documents and other features to help make you a good ranking on search engines. In other words, you will need to reboot.
All that wasted time and effort than you might have been concentrating on your business instead of poring over the image placements, head designs, menus and other content on your website.
Websites are not made in 5 minutes, 10 minutes or even 24 hours. A good website requires a great deal of initial thought and consultation with theclient, even the design on-line. Once this is done, the hard work really begins! For small businesses, the last thing you need is to spend time pouring over your web site trying to find out why search engines are not listing you!
To create a web presence, this is the time you need to go through: –
Register your domain name – take some time over it. It could be with you for a very long time. Ideally it should reflect your business activityin one way or another – but the name you ultimately get may not be available, so you'll have to look at the available options or start again with a different name. The hosting company will provide search tools availability.
Then you decide what your website looks – it's not as easy as it sounds! Yes, you can use templates and finally decided on a style that appeals to you. This is by far the easiest way to get under way – you can doGBBO by the scheme. There are disadvantages though. You'll probably want some individuality and trim to try and give you an edge.
You need to a hosting company for your website started on the internet – there are many available on a wide range of prices. Key points here to consider is customer support, online time, bandwidth and equipment supplied.
You will need your website to maintain, analyze it and keep it to improve traffic to generate. It iswhere the real work begins! It is not difficult to use Analytics reports on your site performance to get your rating back-and site maps to improve – but it is time consuming!
By all means, use the GBBO scheme to get your feet wet – but if your business is to succeed, you need hosting company to use a commercial Web site design, so why not get on the right foot the start? Cost is very reasonable if you choose wisely.
