So you have an excellent product or service. You know how to sell it and increase sales by traditional methods - word-of-mouth & direct mail to name two. Now which of following is you:-

• You know that you should be using the internet to grow your business but you are not sure how. You know that if you don’t your competitors are going to get an upper hand. Or
• You are convinced that the internet is total waste of time as it has already burnt a whole in your budget and wasted a lot of your time. Your internet presence is an embarrassment to your company and detracts rather than adds to the value of your products or services. You want to get rid of it but you know you can’t. You don’t know what to do. Or
• You have a web site that attracts potential customers that you would not otherwise had access to, a good proportion of them become your customers and repeatedly buy from you. You measure results & know how effective your marketing budget is and you are able to confidently spend more on marketing that works.

If the third description fits you - Congratulations. You will Knock Out The Competition With A Web site To Die For! If its one of the first two descriptions that fit then you need to do something about it.

Web site Objectives
Your web site is just one tool in the toolbox of your company that is used to market & sell your product & services. That is, a web site MUST sell. All sales & marketing processes have two simple steps and web sites are no different. For web sites those two steps are:-

• Visitors from your target audience arriving at your web site, i.e. a steady stream of qualified leads.
• Conversion of your visitors into customers - and the web site may only be part of that process.

Miss out either of the above and your web site is ineffective. Everything else revolves around these two objectives. Converting interest into action is the only way you turn a marketing budget into real sales.

Business not Technology
Too often, you will hear web companies preach to you about virtues of each of these areas but as a business owner what you need to know which of these areas should receive your attention and budget to achieve your business objective of getting qualified prospects and converting them into customers. There are no hard and fast rules but one component outweighs all others. And that is content. Good content will have the most effect on both the search engines and you human visitors.

Content is King
Copy writing, is probably the most important item on your web site. It is said that Content is King and it is absolutely true. Why, you have to ask, do so many companies, pay thousands to develop a web site with smart flash animations and graphics and then write the content themselves then? It can only be that they have not grasped the importance of the words on their web site. After all it’s the words that people read, it’s the words that call people to action, it’s the words that sell. The rest helps, but a site with poor words is as bad as a site with no words and that is just unheard of.

There is a plethora of “top ten’s” about building a good web site and there are two themes that run through them all and one of them is that Content is King. Search Engine Optimization Experts may well be able to rewrite parts of your web site to appear attractive to the search engines, appear on the first page of Goggle and get you more visitors. But the resultant text & layout is so unfriendly to the human reader that they are immediately turned off and hit the back button. Content is a double-edged sword because it is used by the search engines to provide search results and the very same content must compel the human visitor in to action.

Let Your Prospects Get To Know You
Earlier I mentioned that two themes run through web site “top ten’s”. The second theme is to develop a long-term relationship with your potential customer. The web is an inherently distrustful medium and you have got to instill confidence into your potential customer that you are a real personable organization worth doing business with. None of this is rocket science but it is so often not done. Some ways of doing it are :-

• Testimonials from previous clients
• Independent Product or Service Reviews
• Awards
• Case studies
• Worthwhile original content

Once the initial confidence is built up you can focus on building a long-term relationship with your new prospect. Again there are many ways to do this where the aim is keep in constant contact with your prospect. Easy and growing in popularity are:

• Regular Electronic Newsletters
• Free Reports
• Free mini-Courses

Once produced they cost nothing to keep sending to your prospects and the technology is in place to allow you to do this with minimal time involvement from yourself.

Foundations
A web site is too often seen as a product, something delivered at a point in time. It is true that there is a point in time when the web site goes live but this is very short-sighted to see it this way. And you can be sure you will never wipe out the competition this way. Beating the competition is a long-term strategy . It takes time and it takes a process that starts way before any discussion about the technology takes place.

Conclusion
You need someone to understand your business, take you through a proven process, talk business not technology and then develop a solution to match. Your business needs to attract the attention of its target market (niche) and then convert them to customers. How do you do that? Be personal, develop a relationship, show them you are real and can be trusted and are worth getting to know. Time is precious and your audience is thinking “Are you worth giving up my time for?”.

Once done, its just a matter of time before they buy. If they are the right audience then time is the only variable.

So the word web site is insufficient. The phrase Internet Marketing Solution is much better. Don’t buy a web site it will cost you. Invest in an Internet Marketing Solution it will reward you. After all, that is your objective to market your product & services on the internet. And you want a solution that provides everything - the core web site design & development, good graphics, copy writing, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, and Email marketing.

© Rugged Rhino 2005

Jeremy Curtis runs Rugged Rhino - Small Business Web Design Specialists. He can be contacted at http://www.ruggedrhino.co.uk or 0845 201 1946.

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Many people end up hiring either a friend or relative to get their web site done. Maybe it will be free, maybe you will get a discount. Either way, if your friend is a professional, it can be a great deal. If they are not (and sometimes even if they are), it may end up being more hassle than it is worth.

There is some blurry line out there that distinguishes professionals from amateurs. Not only is this line blurry, but it’s somewhat different for each person. I might consider someone an amateur, but you might consider them a professional.

The position of that line is based primarily on two things: Level of skills and level of conduct. Someone can be much stronger in one than another and still be considered a professional by many.

Let’s talk about two mythical web designers. Joe and Suzy Web design web pages for people. They gets paid for it. They makes a living from it. So far, we don’t know enough about Joe and Suzy to decide if we would consider them professionals.

Joe is a people person. He’s great at communicating. He is able to figure out exactly what a customer’s wants and needs are, and the customer knows that he understands. Joe’s actual design skills, while not great, are competent.

Suzy, on the other hand, is a fantastic designer. She feels more at home working on the computer than she does interacting with customers. While she is uncomfortable meeting with clients, she knows that it is necessary, and still acts very polite and tries to communicate well with clients.

Who is the more professional? If you were just looking at portfolios, you might say Suzy. If you were to meet with both designers, you might say Joe. But if both of them have an appropriate amount of skills in both areas, they’re both professionals. The difference of opinion generally comes in what is an appropriate amount of skills.

If you’re lucky, you get one person who’s great in both. Or one design firm that both Suzy and Joe work at.

Of course, running a good business enters into the equation also, but unless specific details are known by the client, that does not necessarily have an effect on perceived professionalism.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.

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No question about it, web design is an art.

Finding the right blend of style and usability is a delicate balance that few, if any, fully master.

Which is why I am so tired af reading bullet-pointed lists demanding what you should and shouldn’t do while building your website. These dictators of web design are under the mysterious illusion that they have stumbled upon exactly the right balance of functionality and beauty.

Do you think Michelanglo painted his Sistine Chapel after reading an article entitled, “10 steps to perfect renaissance art”?

Hmm. What these designers are really saying is, “My view of what makes a good website is more valid than yours and any opinion to the contrary is doomed to failure”.

There are no right and wrong ways to design a website. Every technique you have ever been told is wrong, can be utilised succesfully in the proper setting. And, equally, every technique you have even been told is right, can be a complete failure in the hands of the inept.

Next time you read an article on web design, remind yourself, this is just one opinion. Not the right one, not the wrong one, just an opinion.

In fact, better yet, stop relying on the articles for ideas. Instead, spend your time visiting websites that exist in reality, not in the mind of the imaginationless writer.

Visit web sites designed by the amateur coder and visit websites designed by professionals. The internet is brimming with original ideas and they are not the sole domain of the expert. Anyone can come up with something new or different.

If you are building your own website, visit a few hundred others first. Pick out the good, the bad and the ugly and use this as a springboard to create your own masterpiece.

If someone with more experience wants to offer you advice, listen to it, but don’t automatically assume that they must know better. Have the courage and conviction to experiment and decide for yourself what works.

Because although the techniques of art can be taught, the imagination of art cannot.

David Congreave is owner of The Nettle Ezine, the newsletter for the home business — online.

David lives in Leeds, in the United Kingdom with his wife Leanne.

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