Sometimes building your own website can be a very daunting experience – pretty much it’s like building your dream house. We know this because we’ve built several of our own websites and also some for our clients. They came to us because they didn’t know where to begin which is quite understandable for those that don’t know the process. So we thought we’d provide our readers with some simple steps in building websites from start to finish. This doesn’t include creating content or images. Here are the steps:

1. This may be the most tedious task but PLAN – plan what you want your website to look like and then what content you’re planning to include. Take out your business plan and start jotting down ideas.

2. Step 1 is generally the hardest and the most time consuming. The rest is easy. So now you’ve got your business plan and the first step in building a website is to buy a domain name. There are different types of domains, local suffix (e.g com.au, net.au) or international suffix (.com, .net, .org). We use netregistry for local domains and GoDaddy for international domain registrations.

2.Once you have purchased your domain name you need to determine where you’re going to host your domain (simply where are you going to store your files). As a simple analogy imagine the domain being a street address and the hosting as the house. The house is where you actually physically live in but the address is a location of where the house is. Depending on your requirements, you can buy a cheap house or an expensive house… it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you want lots of storage then this will cost you.

godaddy provides hosting as well as quite a number of other companies. Managing your hosting and domains can be quite consuming so you can always get us experts to manage this for you. You can concentrate running your business whilst we concentrate to make sure your online presence is working.

3. Now you have a domain and hosting. Your friends and relatives will now be able to work out where you live and visit you. The only problem now is that once they enter your house you have no furniture, there’s no tree or even a garden. So what you need now is to DESIGN your website and provide CONTENT. Most hosting companies provide you with a quick and easy way of installing a Content Management System such as joomla, wordpress, drupal, or for an Ecommerce website use oscommerce, magento – this will also allow you to sell product online. But the hardest part is putting together the design of your website and the actual content. Developing the design can be a very tedious, time consuming and difficult process. I know many businesses that didn’t proceed with launching their website because of the design. Let me assure you that most businesses NEVER get the first design right. They go through many revisions and constant changes – this is the life of the world wide web. You can hire designer or even use templates (free or paid) available from different companies. There are many around… one of the most popular is templatemonster.com All you have to do is basically change the template to suit your business. Once you’ve got the content (if you have done step 1 correctly then this should be a breeze) then you can go to the final step of launching and marketing your website.

4. Now comes the most difficult part…. which is to get your businesses on the Internet and market your website. This can be done through viral marketing (even putting together a simple video and uploading it on Youtube) can do the job. There’s also the traditional way of handing out pamphlet and sending out email to friends. If you do want to get your business out on the Internet and on the first page of google you need to look at Search Engine Optimisation – this means developing your website to be search engine friends and have the relevant content that people are searching for. Many of us never get there because your industry so large that there are so many website out there already. For us, we’re currently doing pretty well as our website is on the first page (second listing – damn you Wikipedia) for the search term digital signage on google.com.au
Now if you think SEO is not working for you then there’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – this basically means you pay to get your business listed in the search result sponsored sections. Normally top and right hand side of the search result pages. The cost depends on how popular your keywords are and how many other companies are bidding for those keywords. It can get expensive but it is one of the quickest way to obtain clients. An alternative is to use social networking tools such as Facebook, myspace and twitter to reach the public.

So there you go, this is a brief look at advertising your business on a website. Now if you can’t be bother or don’t have the time to do any of the above, then don’t hesitate to contact us for a quote as we’re more than happy to help.

About Us: Advertise Me

Advertise Me www.advertiseme.com.au Request a Digital Signage Quote

Advertise Me is a privately owned Australian company specialising in all aspects of digital signage solutions.

Our team of highly skilled professionals is able to introduce innovative ways for businesses to communicate with their intended audiences for a variety of purposes including informing, educating, entertaining and selling.

You can expect us to:

  • offer the most affordable and cost effective solutions tailored to your specific business needs.
  • provide you with concise and accurate information and will ensure that you understand and are comfortable with our proposals.
  • strive to make our clients happy and successful.

We have partnered with a number of key reputable organisations and will continue to build further partnerships to deliver the most effective solutions for our customers.

Visit our website at www.advertiseme.com.au for more information.