The first component for your online presence is your website itself. If you do not currently have a website, then you need to consider where the website will be hosted and what domain you will pick for your website. Are you going to use your company name or a name that describes your business? Are you going to select a .COM site, a .CA site, or another option? Your choice may be dependent on where you are located or how you want to be found or even could be based on the domain name that you want to choose. Most of the good web development houses can provide you website hosting, and can register and help you with selection of your domain as well.
Whether you sell products over the web or not, it is important that when you develop your website that you have a goal for the website and a plan. A website today is not stagnant where you create a layout and content once and it stays that way indefinitely. The idea is to have fresh content and have users come back again and again, because you will not get a call on the first browse of your site. It takes a user returning many times to your website before they will initiate contact.
The website needs to be aesthetically pleasing to the reader’s eye and must be easy to navigate. If you make it difficult to find content, they will leave. The website content needs to portray what you want to tell the prospect or customer about you as a company. They need to read the first page and understand what you do and why they should buy from you. The other pages on your site need to provide useful content in order to help them make a decision to contact you. This will differ very much from business to business, product to product, and geography to geography. The key is to know your target prospect and create a reason for them to contact you versus your competition. You also need to consider what browsers and platforms that you want your user to have access to your site, whether that be a mobile device, iPad, or different screen size and resolution screens on a computer.
Today there are content management systems and tools where sites can be created and updated easily. It is important that your site is able to be supported and when you need changes, they are easy to do whether by the web developer or yourself. A small business should never have a full HTML site created that has to be maintained by someone else where every change costs you money. A good web development company will offer you content management tool options along ongoing support packages which include hours for making changes to the site, so you can spend time worrying about your business.
As of January 2014, every Canadian business with over 50 employees will be required to have a website that is accessible. What this means is that individuals with disabilities can access your website and have ease doing so. Disabled can even include older individuals who have trouble reading small fonts on a screen. Have you ever gone to a website that you had to squint to read the text or there was a bothersome flashing or rotating picture that made it hard to concentrate. There are features such as font size/type, colours, readability, tags for pictures and links, and flow of the site to name a few that will be assessed. A website should really be accessible anyway in order to make sure that your website is easy to read and navigate even if you are smaller than 50 employees. Do you really want to lock out a segment of the population from doing business with you?
Building a Small Business Online Presence