Your Website

This is a large topic. The following pages are a step-by-step guide to creating, building and promoting your website:

Having, marketing, and selling from a website are three of the most important things you can do for your business. If you don't do business online you are unlikely to be here in a few years time. That isn't an exaggeration. Online business has doubled in three years. Tourism has consistently been the highest performing category of online sales - and it continues to grow dramatically. In 2003 ordinary consumers in Europe spent 12.5 billion - billion - Euros (£9 billion) online on holidays. By 2006 this had more than doubled, rising to 26.9 billion Euros (£20 billion). According to the Centre for Tourism Research, £7.6 billion of this 2006 expenditure was spent by customers in the UK. Many firms are now reporting that 85% of their business comes from online customers and increasingly, businesses are opting to do less and less offline marketing.

Get the right site

Having a site is not enough. You need the right site. There are three aspects to this:

Legislation - Does your site conform to e-commerce, distance selling, advertising and discrimination legislation? If it doesn't you could be breaking the law and could be fined.
Search engines - Does your site rank well in the search engines? Is it search engine friendly? Are the text, images and layout designed with the search engines in mind? Everyone at the end of an internet connection is potentially a customer of yours - but only if they can find you.
Marketing - Does your site appeal to your customers and attract new ones? Does it project the right image? Does it provide the right information? Is it attractive? Does it capture the customers who come to browse and turn them into buyers? Are you driving traffic to your site and getting sales or are customers getting turned off and clicking away?

Internet business is valuable. Taking the time to make sure you've got the right site and that it is maximising every single customer that comes to look, could be the single most effective thing you do to market your business.

You are the best person to design and promote your site

Using the internet to advertise and market your business, and take bookings and sales, is not rocket science. You don't need to be at all technical, nor does it have to cost a lot. But you do need to know what to do and how go about it. Broadly speaking there are eight steps.

Think about your product
Think about your customers
Design (or redesign) your website
Get it built (or revamped)
Optimise it with the search engines
Pick your marketing partners
Improve your responses to enquiries and bookings
Monitor the results

The only step you are unlikely to be able to do yourself is Step 4: Get it built - for that you'll need the help of good, local website designer. But for every other step you are the best person to do the work. You can pay someone to do it for you, but they will only be doing what we show you here, only not so well, because they don't know your business - or your customers - like you do. Nothing about the other seven steps (including Step 5) requires technical knowledge, you just need to know what you should be doing and how to go about it. And, like everything else, you need a thorough, methodical approach.

What's the cost?

It's possible to get a good website for between £200 and £400 pounds. If that's all you can afford then you can still make a site that really works for you. However, if you can, you should budget at least £1000 in the first year and at least £500 in the second and subsequent years. Without question, your website is your most important marketing and selling tool. Arguably, creating it, and promoting it, should take up at least 60% of your overall marketing budget.

There are tricks to keeping the cost down is:

Know what you want - by far and away, failing to know what you want is what makes websites expensive. Shilly-shallying around getting the designer to tweak this, change that and add the other, because you hadn't thought it through properly in the first place, is what pushes up prices.
Provide clear plans and layouts - for the same reason as above. Making a paper site yourself (literally, sketching it out on sheets of paper) allows you to make all the expensive mistakes for free. You can test your concepts, layouts and ideas, make sure the whole things hangs together, and you can get friends and family to 'drive' the site to see if it works, before ever spending a penny on the designer.
Provide clear text and images - again, do it all on paper first. You will have to provide the copy and images anyway, your web designer isn't miraculously going to be able to write effectively and personally about your business and, unless you want to pay a lot of money, they aren't likely to trot down and take pictures. Since you've got to provide it anyway, honing your text and images before you engage your designer, and road-testing on your family and friends, will save you hundreds of pounds in unnecessary edits.
Pick a good, local website designer - clearly this is essential not just to keeping the cost down, but to getting a good, attractive site. There are lots of web site designers and builders out there. Researching who are the good designers is not as hard as you think, and, because you are going to do the planning yourself and provide a lot of information to your designer, you should be able to get really firm quotes. There is a lot more about picking a web designer in the following sections.