Your presence on the world wide web can be as small and distinct as you want, or as large as your business needs. The typical categories for web presence can be (listed from the smallest to the largest):
- A professional with the need to be contactable online (like guitar teacher, plumber, locksmith, roofer, architect, solicitor, sports coach, handyman, volunteer, …)
- A group of individuals with a common goal (like charity organisation, interest group, sports club, drone users, choir group, …)
- An organisation or individual with the need to promote and market any services online (shop, building firm, restaurant, tradesman, wine club, …)
- An organisation with the need to sell goods and services online
- An organisation that deals with sales in multiple regions, markets, countries and currencies
- And organisations with needs more complex than any of the above
With all of these, there are a number of items that may need to be set up.
A name and number
It starts with an identity. Something that uniquely defines you, or your digital footprint. It used to be a postcode. A telephone number. You could pay extra for an easy-to-remember phone number, or accept the one that the telephone provider gave you. It is the same here:
- Secure and register a unique site name like ‘mom-and-pop-in-the-shires.co.uk’ for very little outlay.
- Try and register a high value domain name (like ‘finance.co.uk’), and pay thousands (if not millions) for the privilege.
- Purchase a “certificate” for your domain name. A quality hallmark that proves you are who you claim you are. And also allows your customers to browse your site securely.
We can help with all of this.
Create a website
Woo, hold on, a full website? How do I do that?
That depends on how involved you want to get. The involvement can be anything between any of these:
- “I have no knowledge of web design. Make me a site, even a single contact page, and it stays like that”.
- “I’d like to get involved in the design of the site, to learn tricks, and evolve the site. I may want to further evolve it, under guidance. Or not.”
- “I’d like to get involved in the design in the site. Once it is complete, I’d like to maintain it myself, and change the pages to reflect any updates to our situation”.
- “I am a blogger. I need a site so I can publish posts. Regularly”.
- “I have bigger needs. Once the site is complete, there will be several users maintaining the site. I need fine-grained control over them, to be able to create and delete users, and control what they can or can’t do”.
- “Give me a bare site, and I’d build it myself. No design service wanted”.
Yes, we cater for all of these.
Online trading
You may want to sell items online. That involves a few more steps:
- You need to sign up with a payment provider that can take payments online and credit your account.
- You may need to maintain the site on a regular basis, to update the items you sell, adjust prices, keep tab on stock levels, and run promotional activities and sales.
- You may need to link up with other sites. Pick stocks automatically. Import products. Export products.
Marketing and promotions
The world is your oyster. Nearly all of us have profiles on social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn). Promote the site on your social networks, or work with us to create cross-posting logic and automation to your social networks.
Now tie that in to monitoring traffic to your site. We have automatic monitoring running on all sites. Run promotions on Twitter, and check the traffic increase on your site. Create Instagram posts, and see if it increases your web profile. We can deal with all of these.
What else..?
There are a number of other activities that should happen, even if nothing breaks when they are not done. We do all of them:
- Backups. Nobody wants to do them. Everybody is playing with fire if they are not done. We do them regularly. And save them to a separate site.
- Search Engine Optimisation. A black art subject. And companies are making fortunes on wild claims. In layman’s terms: Adding the right “extra” information to the site to make Google’s job of finding the key details easier.
- Site statistics. See how your site is doing. Spot trends. Track the result of initiatives, promotions and marketing. Find what works. Exclude the rest.
- Room to grow. Run on a platform where you can upgrade to bigger machines, if you outgrow the current setup. Seamlessly.
- Security. Our machines are sitting behind firewalls and private networks, to stay secure. Permanently. And should disaster strike, there are backups to restore from.
- Email accounts. Our websites have the ability to interact with mail servers, to be able to both send and receive emails.
And once you host my site, you “own” me?
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. If you pay to have a site designed, it is yours. If you want to move it elsewhere, we will help you package up your backup copy that you can take to any other hosting company.
Before we get to such a situation, we’d love to find out why you may want to leave. And find a solution that makes you want to stay for the long term. No obligations, obviously…