I want a website, where do I begin?

So you've decided you want a website? Now what? The gap between the desire and the know-how is very often a large one. Hopefully, I can help shorten that gap by presenting a few proactive steps you can take to help not only your website designer, but yourself in understanding exactly what you want and what you can expect from your website. The lack of a clear direction is the fault of many failing websites.

The First Step Is To Determine The Purpose Of Your Website.

• Is it a commercial website or purely informational?
• If it is commercial, will users be purchasing your products online or is your main purpose to inform the world about your product or service?

It's not an either/or. You can start out informational and have plans and goals to go commercial in the future. It's probably best to determine your immediate need then potential future needs.

Get A Feel For Your Competition

• Go to www.google.com and do a search as if you were trying to find the product, service, or information you plan on putting online. Do this a few times with different search phrases. Write down the words you used in your searches (this will be important later on).
• Does there seem to be a lot of competition for your market?
• If there is, what makes what you offer different or unique? This is difficult if your selling the same blue widget as everybody else. So you will have to think a little harder of how can you be different than the competition.
• If you were your customer, would you go to the competition or yourself? It's important to be honest here so we can make clear distinctions between you and the competitors. This will give us the points where we need to improve in your online business model.
• If you honestly believe you offer your product, service, or information better. Why? This is what we will need to focus on and amplify on your website.
• If you do not, what makes the competition better? Do they offer better service guarantees? Is pricing better? Do they appear more trustworthy? Do they make your browsing experience better? Try to list some clear and specific reasons. This is very important, if you don't address these issues head on and in the beginning your site will have little chance of being a success.

This step may have been a little depressing. Who would've known 1,000,000 other sites out there sell the exact thing as you?! But don't get too down on yourself, there is still room for you. There is still something that makes your idea different...you! (You can be you personally or, you, your business.)

Don't get me wrong. Online customers will not buy from you simply because you are who you are. When someone online is searching for a blue widget, all they're interested in is a blue widget at the cheapest price. The problem is that search engines don't care whether or not you sell the cheapest blue widget, they care whether you are a good, respectable, and relevant website for their users or not (This explained in more detail here "How Search Engines Work").

The only way to accomplish this task is to sell your cheap blue widget in some unique way. And the most unique thing there is to what you are doing is you. So you must have some kind of a personal touch to what you website. If you don't have one, think of one. Your uniqueness will get your blue widget in front of more people, and your price will help close the deal!

"Don't be afraid to be more personal on the web. It is refreshing to see real, natural language in our tech savvy IT world."

I can't stress this enough, you're competing with millions upon millions of other web pages. It is absolutely vital to the success of your website to get creative and offer something fresh and new, even if your selling the tried and true blue widget. It can be done, you just have to use your head.

And by unique, I don't necessarily mean flashy and innovative, although that may help. Unique can simply be your personal touch. Don't be afraid to be more personal on the web. It is refreshing to see real, natural language in our tech savvy IT world.

Start Building On Your Strengths

You've seen the competition, now let's get to work. The next step is to figure out how you will market your site. We do this by choosing 5 or more phrases you think people would type in a search box that would ideally bring your website up as a result.

This may be harder than it sounds. The trick is to be as specific as you can. Remember when you searched for your competition in step 2 and you wrote down those keywords you used to find them? Get that list out and let's look at what we can do to adjust it with the information that came out of step 2. Focusing more on your specific strengths than a generic search for our service or product.

If you have a unique product, this won't be as difficult. If you're a retail store selling a variety of things, it will be a great challenge, or almost impossible. But it's not the end of the world. The online retail store will take a little more time to develop it's ranking in the search engines, but it will also have the chance of reaching a larger audience with it's wide product offering. It just takes some creative planning, patience, and more patience.

As it is in the "real world" it is much more difficult to gain a foothold in a large market than it is a niche. The good thing with the internet is that, as mentioned above in step 2, you're website alone can be a niche even if it is in a more saturated market. It comes down to creativity and the amount of time and resources you are willing to put into it.

One tool that you will want to use during this process is the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ ). You can type in the keyword phrases you came up with and see how competitive, or worthless, they might be. This tool will bring up how many searches were done in Yahoo last month for that specific search phrase. The higher the number the more competitive that market will be, the lower it is the less competitive. Obviously, we want a search phrase that people use frequently but isn't an over saturated market. Finding the balance is the goal here.

This tool will also give you listings of similar search terms. These can be used to build on some other keyword strategies.

Create Your Website Business Model

We know our direction now. We have a focal point and a target to aim at. Now we need to work on the implementation. How will you accomplish your goals and your ideas from step 2? What are some practical things you can do to meet those goals?

It's important to take the pace of your internet business slow, deliberate and on purpose. There was a commercial a few years ago that pretty much any web designer cringed every time he/she saw it because it created this huge, false expectation of an online business. In the commercial this brand new business got everything just right and they finally opened their online store. All the employees gathered around the office computer to see what would happen next. 1 order came in, then 2, then 5 more, 13, 30, 65, and so on until the number became an accelerated blur. The number just started running up as they were sitting around the computer watching it. The commercial was for some shipping service, and the tag line was something to the affect of "Will you be ready? Use our shipping service..." blah blah blah.

At that instant, all the small business owners of america saw dollar signs jumping through the air. What a horrible commercial! Let me be blunt. It does not work that way! You will not see an extra couple of zeros added to your bottom line at the end of the first month you have your website online. The real bottom line is that it takes time to build online. It takes a long time for people to find your site and it takes even longer to see any results in the search engines.

The first thing to make note of in your online business model is that you need to be looking at a good year before you see any kind of real action on your website, and that is probably a cutting it short. Anything sooner is a miracle. This gives you an added advantage though. You can take it slow, relax. You can implement all your ideas in a series of phases instead of all at once.

For example, I always suggest to an online retail store that instead of putting your entire product line on the internet right away, take your top 10-15 items and get those online. This will help you get the feel of how your website will work and provide more of a test market that you can use to alter your goals and visions. This will also help keep your opening operating costs low. Frankly, nobody knows if your website will work anymore than if you opened up a new physical location in a shopping center. The good thing is that online "rent" is cheap!

So what are your long and short term goals? What needs to take place in order to reach these goals and let's break it down into more manageable bites.

This is only the beginning. But if you came up with some tangible information and ideas going through these steps, you will be light years ahead of most small businesses online. If you don't have any tangible information, hopefully you at least have more questions and a better understanding of what you may need to do before you jump on in. Most online small businesses don't know where their going, what to expect, and most importantly, how to get there. But, it's like they say, knowing is half the battle.