You may be considering hiring someone to design and develop your glass art website - if so, the next five steps will help you determine what you really need:
Step One - Choose a Website model and style
You could choose a blog, a standard website or an eCommerce website.
- A blog is typically easier to manage and easier to update content but it also has less flexiblity than a standard or eCommerce website. Blogs generally have a relaxed writing style and are written in the first person (i.e. "I went...").
- A standard website is typically more structured than a blog and is written in a formal writing style (i.e. "Our Business provides...").
- eCommerce websites are just standard websites with additional tools (i.e. a shopping cart) to let you sell products and services. There are a number of out-of-the-box or hosted shopping cart systems available to make it easy for you to sell online so if you don't have a lot of money you can pay a monthly fee to have someone else host the shopping cart for you.
After you have selected the style of website, you can choose from a 'static' or a 'dynamic' website. Static websites have content that stays the same unless you manually update it. Dynamic websites create content at the point in time when a user visits and are much more flexible. For example, you can make one change and have it apply to all pages on the website, rather than updating each page individually like in a static website.
An example of a dynamic website is a content management system (CMS) like Joomla (which is a free open source CMS). CMS are very good options for starting a website because they are flexible and easy for people like artists to update. They usually have visual tools (WYSIWYG) that help you add new pages and pictures and format them - it's almost like using a basic version of Microsoft Word to format your pages.
Step Two - Undertake Market Research
After you have decided on a website design and style for your business, you need to perform some market research to ensure your website is competitive on the internet. With so many websites available, you really need to differentiate yours. There are three types of market research you need to do:
- Competitor analysis - there are a number of tools available on the internet to research your competitors and what type of online advertising they are doing. One of these is KeywordSpy where you can see your competitor's ads, what keywords they pay for, what organic keywords they are ranked (in search) for, and who their competitors are (which gives you more ideas about who else to research).
- Customer analysis - like any business offline, you need to understand what your customers will be expecting from your new website. Conducting a survey is a great way to find out what your customers need from your new website presence.
- Keyword analysis - keywords are words that describe your business, products, services and specialities. For example, a glass artist might have "art glass" as a keyword for their business.
Step Three - Develop the Physical Website Design
Now you need to think about structure (e.g. where will my menus be placed, how will information appear on each page) for your website. You also need to develop a plan for content and links. The best idea is to get out some paper and pencils and draw a linked box for each menu and each page on your website. Then you will have a visual reference as you develop the site.
Step Four - Undertake Online Marketing
Once you have your website up and running you need to promote it. Like we said in step one - you really need to differentiate yourself out of the web because people don't know you from a bar of soap! There are a huge number of ways you can market your website online. However a few include:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo
- Affiliate marketing - where you have other people selling your products on your behalf for a commission
- Getting listed in online directories
- Sending out eNewsletters
Step Five - Monitor and Track your Website Success
Finally your website is up and running and you have started marketing it. Now you need to monitor how successful your web site is, including:
- Website statistics - who finds your website and how
- Company and personal online perception - like any business marketing you need to know how you and your business is perceived online
- Leads - how many sales leads you generate from your website
- Sales Conversions - tracking how many people buy from you versus how many people visit your website
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