Step 1: Determine Your Web Site's Goals
Everyone - including customers and acquaintances - is asking if you have a Web site. It's a hurdle you haven't yet cleared for so many reasons.
1. It's unfamiliar territory and therefore difficult to add to your overall plan.
2. Having a Web site will cost money. How much money and how it will be recouped are questions for which you have no answers.
3. Finding someone to research and create the site is time consuming, and right now, running the store is more important.
These are all valid points. Anything that takes you out of your comfort zone causes alarms to start ringing.
But there's another alarm, the one that tells you that an Internet site may open new sales opportunities you never considered.
The Web is here to stay, and in time, it will become more refined. Customers and potential clients will look for your products and services through this technological tool.
It will produce additional revenue, much more than the investment cost. And, just like learning how to operate a store, you'll find a comfort zone on the Web as you did with a traditional shop.
Before jumping into the Web's waters simply to satisfy other people's curiosity ("Are you on the Web?"), invest a few days to determine how an online site will complement your brick-and-mortar store. Some reasons why my retail store clients choose to create an online presence were to:
- Distribute tickets to in-store events. Rather than mailing invitations,
store owners created a ticket image online for printing by customers who
presented the ticket upon entering the store's special event.
- Stay in touch with customers through an online newsletter. Customers
subscribed to the newsletter on the Web site or in person at the store.
- Increase sales from meeting planners who buy welcome gifts for attendees of area conferences and events.
Ask staff members and loyal customers for insight on what makes a Web site a must-visit space. Also, look for sites that belong to local stores and competitors. Your mission is to view their strengths and weaknesses rather than copy their models.
All of this will help you to form the basis of what will appear on your site, and that will be your blueprint. Remember that as you move forward, your site will never be finished. Every Web site is forever under construction. You'll edit events and add new pages for as long as you own Internet real estate.
Best of all, you'll have started a brand new business extension that pays off in ways that will make you happy to have created a Web site.
Next: Step 2 - Register Your Domain Name
