Building Your Website
There are a number of steps you need to consider in building your website, before you make any decisions:
- what you want on your website
- how potential customers are going to find your website
- Choosing and registering a suitable domain name
- what your website is going to look like
- how you are going to keep your website up to date
- which web hosting service you are going to use
Shopping Carts
When choosing a shopping cart it is vital that you begin at the end, so to speak; i.e. you consider how customers are going to pay for the goods. This and other issues are discussed extensively on our page on payment processing and our page on shopping carts.
Promoting and Publicising Your Website
Unfortunately this is another important consideration which is usually left to last. It should be one of the first considerations. The question "How are potential customers going to find my website?" determines to a very large extent what the content of the site is going to be, because it is the content that is indexed by search engines. If it is not important that people find your site through search engines, then this is less important, but we always recommend building a site with search engines in mind to start with because it can be so costly to rectify this at a later date. An extensive series of pages is going to be produced on this topic soon.
Domain Name Registration
It is wisest that this reflects what your company sells or the service it provides, rather than your company name, unless this is already well-known. Our owner has posted a discussion of this topic on our ecommerce for startups forum. We also recommend registering your domain name as soon as possible. This is because of the time it takes search engines to index new sites. You should place some basic content on your home page, even if the site is not yet ready for public viewing. It can then be submitted to Google, Yahoo and MSN (the only spidering search engines you need to submit to, by the way!) However, be careful about choosing your web host - see the final point.
Website Design
When it comes to the actual design and construction of your website, Dreamweaver is widely regarded as the "industry standard" programme for doing so. However, bear in mind that Dreamweaver is expensive, it takes time to learn to use properly, you will need to have a good eye for web design, and it requires considerable experience to build a good website. A poorly designed and badly constructed website could give your company a very bad image. Therefore, for a small mail order business it is often better to use a
professional web design company. You should provide your web designer with your vision in straightforward documents, with an idea of what sections you want it broken up into. If there are sites you really like, make a note of their URLs and tell the
designer.
Updating Your Website
You also need to consider how you are going to update your website. Your web designer can do this for you, but find how much s/he will charge for doing so. You can ask them to design the website using software such as Dreamweaver, so that you can use the same programme to keep your website up to date.
However, if you find the prospect of learning how to use Dreamweaver formidable, and you wish to be able to update your website from any (internet-connected) computer anywhere anytime, it is best to get your website set up with a
content management system - you will need to specify this from the outset.
Choosing a Web Host
This will depend critically on your answers to the first question and to the fifth question. Your web hosting package needs to be able to support what you want to place on your website, and how you are going to update it. Although you can register your domain name via a web hosting company and take out a web hosting package together, we recommend that you register your domain name separately, so that you can spend more time in choosing your web host. However, as soon as you have chosen the right web hosting package you should place some content on your home page for the search engines (see the third point).
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