The Kind of Stuff you Know:
Much like any other form of advertising, break a commercial web site down to its basic purpose and the primary, practical function revealed is not unfamiliar. It's nothing more than a modern approach to an age-old strategy to spread information to the masses.
Where Similarities End:
Unlike print or radio ads, however, a business web site offers much greater potential for drawing, and maintaining user interest. Owning a web site enables the business to provide real services to customers, such as the practical examples listed below:
- Services:
- Shop from home, at any hour
- Secure bill payments
- Schedule or cancel appointments
- Request customer service
- Update personal info
- Perform tansactions without affecting the cost of Employee man-power
Oftentimes, the greatest advantage realized by a business is the added convenience in managing product inventory and client data from home, the office (or virtually anywhere), by way of a secure, password protected portal hidden from the public. Empower your business with the versatile, office-wide data management capabilities of a secure web application, and the archaic process of updating records made with software like Excel® or Access® can become a thing of the past-- but you don't have to throw out your existing methods. A properly designed web database will export records compatible with your favorite software, so productivity is not affected. Such versatility means you dictate the learning curve-- there's no surprises, and you're always in control of your important data.
Is this a smart investment?:
When considering a new form of advertising, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons against current strategies, and determine if a new approach will be cost effective. Business web sites tend to yield high return on investment.
The Internet spawned the term “Global Marketplace” because of the window it opened between the business, and virtually any consumer in the world. The following qualities of web site ownership demonstrate efficiency:
- Unlike radio or print ads, a web site will impact your advertising budget only once-- a big bang for your buck!
- Advertise something new without ink and paper expense, service bureau labor charges, or the cost of postage for tedious mail campaigns.
- Local areas beyond your newspaper distribution, yellow pages, and radio will find you through Search Engines like Google®, MSN®, and Yahoo!®.
- Growing number of families receive Internet as part of a Cable TV package
- Business cards become exponentially more effective.
- World-wide Accessibility is literally established.
Looking for Attention:
When we design your Web Site, a key element of our role as your contracted service provider will be the plan we develop for grabbing the attention of your visitors-- and how to keep it long enough to get your message across. The old saying in marketing is that the first 3 seconds are most critical. As your web site becomes a reality, we will focus on this topic. Sharing your own expertise in this area will help us to better understand your market.
Show us your Stuff:
If you're considering a web site, then let us conduct a candid interview with you to determine what you need, and what you don't need in a web site. The most important goal of the FREE consultation should be to determine what you expect your web site to do for your company. The more clearly we understand your expectations, the better we'll meet them.
We are happy to design imagery specifically for your web site, or use your existing images and logos. We can also author the text for your web pages as part of your design package (e.g. to act as copywriter) if needed, however clients who provide their own text tend to be more satisfied with the outcome, so we strongly encourage you to provide an outline for each page.
New web site clients might provide the following existing items to maintain a consistent branding strategy:
- Company logo
- Digital images
- Photographs
- Product catalog
- Description of services offered
- Customer testimonials
Some materials require special arrangements for making them web-ready but in most cases, these items can be easily burned to a CD-ROM. The quality of the web site is impacted by the quality of the content you provide us, so please select your materials with care.
Who, What, When, Where, and Why:
Ask yourself the following questions. Please consider writing down anything which comes to mind that you feel we should know.
- Who is your target audience?
- What was the primary feature of your most effective, or favorite advertising campaigns?
- When a customer or client thinks of doing business with you, what image comes to their mind? How might we create that image in your web site?
- Where do we find the web sites that you like?
- How did you attract most of your current customers?
- How many pages will you need?
- Try to imagine what your web site might look like. What is the primary feature of that image?
- Does your web site need to "do" anything, such as:
- Maintain an up-to-date inventory?
- Process credit card purchases?
- Allow office personnel to update a news section?
- Act as a portal for customer interaction, like the Classifieds section of an on-line newspaper?
- Allow customers to view their account information?
- Something else you've dreamed of?
We've prepared a document for you to print and hang in your office as a friendly reminder.
Looking Ahead:
New developments in Information Technology are surfacing rapidly, making it nearly impossible to keep up without a dedicated Research & Development team. Let your new web site be the first step in an effort to determine how current IT trends might affect your own business. Once you've been on-line for a while, the public response to your web site will enable you to make decisions concerning the relationship between your business and new technology.
When you're ready, you can count on Centre Web Design to act as your resource for continued development.