Getting Online - First Steps

We have helped a wide variety of companies to establish their initial online presence, from small promotional sites to large e-commerce systems. Our experience suggests that before taking the plunge, you need to think hard about the topics below, and we make sure that we have discussed and planned these areas with you before we even think about designing your site.

This is not an exhaustive list, and your own particular situation may have its own particular needs, but these are the issues which crop up again and again.

There's no point in deciding what you want to say until you know who you're talking to. Identifying your target audience is the essential first step, and your choice of audience affects every aspect of your site strategy.

Where does the information you publish on your site come from? If you already have a company brochure or product catalogue, then this can form the basis of your site, but if not, you need to think carefully about what you want to say. We can write text and produce images for you, but only you know what you want to say. Design is important, but it is the content which your visitors are looking for when they visit.

To make your web pages accessible over the internet, they must be placed on a "web server" computer which has a continuous internet connection.

We can explain how different web hosting solutions meet different needs, and explain why the cost of web hosting varies from free to very expensive. We also provide our own web hosting services, with different cost packages to suit different needs - see our Hosting page for details.

In some cases, our hosting services will not be appropriate for your needs, but that's no problem - you don't have to use our hosting service, and we will be happy to help you to choose a suitable service elsewhere.

You may want to set up your site using a unique Domain Name, which must be registered with the appropriate internet naming authority. Your choice of domain name can say a lot about your company, and choosing a good domain name can be the key to a successful website.

But depending on what you are trying to achieve with your web presence, you may not even need your own domain name. Again, we will advise on the best solution for your needs, and register domain names for you if required.

There's no point in setting up a website if you don't tell anyone that it's there, so promotion is a vital part of any web strategy. Search engines can play an important part (see below), but they are not the whole story, and for many of the hardest-working websites, search engines are completely irrelevant. How and where you publicise your site depends entirely on who you are trying to communicate with, and why. By understanding your business and your customers, we can advise on the best and most cost-effective ways to bring them to your site.

Websites don't take care of themselves, and you need to make sure that you have an effective plan for keeping your site up to date. If you are using your site to attract responses, you also need to ensure that someone is able to deal promptly with those responses - the most common complaint from web users about company websites is that email enquiries go unanswered.

We can ensure that all these aspects of your web strategy are planned and costed as part of the job. If necessary we can also provide staff training and technical support.

There is a great deal of hype about search engines. Some design and hosting companies promise to submit your site to thousands of search engines, and others offer to charge you lots of money for programs and advice about how to achieve high rankings. Almost all these promises and quick-fixes are just hot air - there is no quick and cheap way to put your site at the top of a search engine, and even the expensive ways are rarely effective. Submitting to many engines using one system is almost guaranteed to give low rankings, because different engines work very differently.

We will register your site with search engines, and we will give you a realistic explanation of what search engines can and cannot do for you. If we establish that search engines should be a key element of your web strategy, then we can provide the expertise required to get the best results from them. To find out more about search engines from an independent source, have a look at the excellent information provided on www.searchenginewatch.com.