Building Your First Website:
What You Need to Know to Save Time & $$|
by Nancy J. Wagner

Building your first website can be a daunting task. To make it a bit easier, I've developed the following TO DO list based on my 10 years of building website for a variety of companies:

DOMAIN NAME - You need to secure a domain name, preferably something that is closely associated with your company name or what you are selling. Ideally, get www.yourbusinessname.com. Avoid .net, .info, or .org and always try to get a .com website address since a .com website address is easier for people to remember. I recommend only getting a domain name with .org IF you are a non-profit oganization. One of the least expensive and most reliable places to buy your domain name is from GoDaddy at http://www.godaddy.com.

WEBSITE HOSTING - When you build a website, you need to pay a website hosting company to host the site for you on their servers...this is how websites appear on the Internet. Once again, I recommend GoDaddy at http://www.godaddy.com for their attractively priced web hosting packages. But, before you buy a website hosting plan, talk to us first to make sure you're getting the right plan with all of the features you need.

DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT YOUR WEBSITE TO ACHIEVE - Next, think about what purpose you want your website to serve. Do you want to sell products online, get people to call you to complete the buying process, or encourage them to email you for more info? Once you know what your website should achieve, you're ready to talk to a web designer or choose a website template.

MARKETING - This is one of the most important aspects of building your site - you may have a beautiful site, but if no one is visiting it, what good is it? So, to get visitors to your site who buy or inquire about your services AND who come back again, you'll need a clear marketing strategy in place right at the beginning of your website building project and throughout the life of the website. If you know how you plan to market to visitors BEFORE you build the site, it will be easier to add the right features now. Click here to read an article that provides lots of ideas about the marketing strategies you should consider for your website.

DESIGN & LAYOUT - Once you begin talking to us about website design, we create a flowchart or website schematic that shows how the pages of your website will flow. IF you are selling products where you may need to update the images and information every few days or so, we'll likely recommend a template website; this allows you to add and delete information at anytime without requiring us to handle costly updates for you. You may be able to build a template website yourself and will only require a bit of guidance from us. Otherwise, we can design a customized website to suit your purposes.

At Cut to the Chase Marketing, we help our clients save $$ by having them review other websites and tell us what features they like and don't like. We then take this info and are able to keep the home page development time to a minimum.

COPY & HEADLINES - You'll need to provide writing for each page of your website or rely on us to write it for you once we interview you and gather any information you provide to us. You'll need headlines and copy that appeal to both the search engines and visitors. Many times, to keep costs down, clients give us a minimal amount of unedited copy; we then edit this copy to make it marketing-savvy and search-engine friendly and add it to your site.

IMAGES - You'll also need to determine what kind of graphics you want on your website. We can suggest graphics as part of the design and layout of your website, but if you're selling products, you'll need to provide product photos to be used on your website.

SHOPPING CART - If you plan to sell products on your website, you'll need a shopping cart. A shopping cart is software programmed onto your website that keeps track of the items a visitor buys from your website, completes the payment process, and helps you fulfill the order. If you want to accept credit cards, you'll also need a Merchant Gateway to automatically collect payments for you. If you already have a credit card merchant account you can punch card numbers into, you can use this instead. Or, you might consider using a free shopping cart such as the one from Paypal - they provide a shopping cart and a way to collect the money for you.

In addition to the shopping cart itself, you'll want to make the buying process easy for the buyer - that means providing warranty info, guarantees, shipping info, explanations of the buying process where necessary, etc., anything that makes the buyer feel at ease enough to complete the sale.

We're ready to talk to you about your website ideas - give Nancy a call at 425-415-6427 or e-mail her at nancy@cuttothechasemarketing.com.