How to Put Your Company Online

So you’ve decided your company needs a website. This guide is designed to guide you through the things you need to think about and the things you need to do. Remember that a website is an advert that’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and potentially, the most important piece of marketing you’ll ever do: the more time you spend planning and thinking about what you want your website to achieve the better the rewards will be.

If you decide to ‘go it alone’ it will be a useful checklist of things you’ll need to do and things you’ll need to think about. If you decide to hire a web design company you’ll find it useful to know what they’re doing on your behalf and the type of things they’ll need to discuss with you.

Choosing and registering a domain name

The domain name is the address of your website (e.g. www.bbc.co.uk). When choosing your address, choose one that’s:

• easy to remember, so people don’t need to see it written down
• connected to your business name (or, better still, is your business name!), so existing customers can find you
• not too long, so there’s less chance of people mis-spelling it

Once you’ve chosen your domain name, you need to register it. There are hundreds of websites where you can do this; try www.123-reg.co.uk or www.ukreg.com. (A reputable website company, like QCWebsites, will be more than happy to do this on your behalf, registering as many domain names as you need in your name.)

Planning your website: the big picture

As with any project, it’s important to know at the start what you want the finished product to look like. So you’ll need to decide what you want from your website. Do you want it to be a marketing site – a brochure that tells visitors all about your company? Or do you want it to be an e-commerce site where visitors can buy your products online?

The next decision to make is about who will do the majority of the work on the site. Do you have the skills to do it yourself or will you need to outsource it? Remember that your website will probably be the biggest and most important advert you’ll ever produce, so it’s important you make the right impression. You or a friend might be able to design a basic website, but be honest and ask yourself whether your company might be better represented with a website that’s been professionally designed and produced.

Planning your website: the details

Once you know what you want your website to achieve, it’s time to think about the details. As with any kind of promotion, it’s vital to think in terms of what your customers will want.

Design

Your website should be simple and easy to navigate. Your website’s design should reflect the image you would like to project as a company. So if your company’s image is corporate and professional, your website should be too. If it’s irreverent and fun, your website should be too. (As an example, look at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone and www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree: both sites reflect the image each channel wants to project.)

On a more specific level, remember that if you have corporate colours or a corporate identity, your website needs to follow this.

Sitemap

The sitemap sets out your website’s structure and how each page fits with the others. At a very basic level, you’ll need a homepage, a page that tells people about your company (usually called ‘About Us’), a page or section that describes your product and /or service and a page with your contact details (usually called ‘Contact Us’). It can be interesting to have someone outside your company contribute to this process: they might have some fresh ideas and a much clearer view of what visitors will want than someone involved in the day-to-day running of the company.

Content

When you’ve compiled a sitemap that will be quick and easy for visitors to understand and find their way around, it’s time to think about content. What will your customers want to know? Will they understand the technical terms you use in-house or will you need to simplify them? You’ll also need to think about the words and phrases potential customers will use to find your products or services on search engines. It’s important to use these phrases regularly in your site’s content. (Don’t go over the top, though – if you think it sounds strange, then the chances are your visitors will too.) Again, an outsider may have some suggestions you hadn’t thought of.

Finally, when writing your content, remember that it’s much more difficult to read text on a screen than it is on the printed page, so people only scan text. Keep sentences, paragraphs and pages short, so it’s easy for people to find the information they’re looking for.

Putting your website online

Once you’ve designed, written and built your website, you’ll need to put it online. A hosting provider gives you webspace so you can do this. Many domain name registration companies provide packages that combine registration and webspace.

Making it work for you

The worst thing you can do once your website is online is forget about it. At the very least, make sure that your website’s address is on all the literature you send out. Make it an integral part of your marketing strategy too. For example, could you promote special offers that are only available to people who fill in a form on your site?

www stands for World Wide Web, and that’s exactly what the internet is. You need your site to be part of that web by getting other relevant sites to link to yours so internet users (and search engines) can find you as they ‘surf’.

Probably most important, though, is to keep your website up-to-date and give visitors a reason to come back. If you start selling a new product, add it to your website (and remove information on products you aren’t selling any longer). Keep any news up-to-date too, because news items about something that will be happening in May 2005 look embarrassing and careless.

Because your website isn’t something you can touch, it is very easy to forget about it once you’ve put it online. But it’s an advert that’s available worldwide 24 hours a day 7 days a week. With a bit of thought and planning it can be a powerful sales and marketing tool you’ll soon wonder what you did without.