To start any business, small or big, online or offline, service-based or product-base, and whatever product to sell, for profit or non-profit organisation, there has to be a Business Plan.
The business plan is structured to the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat) in terms of the 5 Ms. 1. Money, 2. Manpower, 3. Machinery 4. Market 5. Materials.
The same principle applies for E-Business and to begin, lets start with an example of starting a small home-based company to do some selling of household products through the Internet.
The first action to take is to register a domain name. What name to choose that it can be easy to remember, and it should sound like the product that you are going to sell. Do not choose names like NOVA for a car, which means NO GO in Spanish, like what our mod, Germix mentioned. Go to Domain name Register and do search for names and extension. Choose an extension, name with number of alternatives, best to have DOT COM, next is DOT NET if you are dealing with network, and then the others like DOT ORG (which is usually for non-profit Organisations and Religious groups.
Let us jump step, to Web Designing and structure. For some products there are discussion forum, or Q&A form, where the customers ask Questions and the Moderators answer them, but this is time consuming and very heavy on the Sales and Customer Service staff, so many of them turn to FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and give them the answers. This is because many of the Questions are just being repeated by different people who are new to the forum. A Website selling herbs for health and supplement I came across has a life Q & A session, and the guy, named James was an expert on the subject and is able to answer any question spontaneously.
Many online portals have Shopping Basket facility, but came short of payment transactions. Some experienced sites have all the facilities, including: Credit Card payment, pay on collection of item from Affiliates, such as Seven-Eleven stores and Cash Card transaction, and Electronic Wallet. For payment transactions, security has to be established with Encryption coded transactions involving the Credit Card Merchant Bank and the customer's computer on SSL.
Design of the Website toe on the line between highly attractive, full of high resolution graphics and for browsers running on narrow bandwidth systems such as dial up modems to have the patience to wait for the page to upload into his/her computer screen. Forrester Research found out that more than 80% of the people will not wait for longer than 30 seconds for the display to be fulfilled. The website should have as low memory size as possible for such slow system to upload, and not losing the audience, yet be attractive to keep him/her interested. Web designers did some tricks, such as: cut down the graphic size by slicing the background, or not so important part, and lower its resolution, but maintain higher resolution for the most important object. Such feature is available in most graphic editing softwares. Further, the graphics can be compressed and converted into GIF, or JPEG, or PNG formats, and with Web friendly colours. Big pictures are sized down to minimise the bytes, and if the browser is interested, s/he may click on it to expand the picture.
Colours are individual's likes and dislikes, however colours have emotional affiliations, and to design a website for children and maternal things with dark colours turn them off.
Navigation - is as important as to lead your audience to the place where they want to go. They should have the option of buying immediately on the keyboard, and such facility should be available,and your contact information should also be on the spot.
Some designers uses authoring tools to design their website with fantastic looking navigation, lots of graphic animations and music background. Be careful about this, as they take up lots of bandwidth, and may take couple of minutes to upload. Only use animation and Flash or ShortWave when necessary, give the audience the choice whether they want to go through the movie or skip, and turn off the music.
The next point is very important, as there are millions of websites in the WWW, how to attract the audience, to be a part of the search engine target? Older Search Engines runs through the METAFILE in the HTML script, and many web designers write key words with as much variations as possible to be Search Engine friendly. However the newer engines run through the first few lines of the webpage, even through the PDF files. To increase your exposure, you have to put up as many proxy servers as possible, and to participate in high profile forums with your web page registered, like the Alibaba forum. After doing the Metafile, run tests with various types of Search Engines, the most popular ones to the lesser, and use various browsers, the Mac system, Firefox, Netscape, Explorer and so on.
Key in a search word for your item, and try it with Alta Vista, Google, WebCrawler, Yahoo, MSN, and others.
Use other media to promote your website. Along with tradition business, introduce your homepage as a part of your Customer Service to the customer. Pass out hardcopies of your namecards with website and email addresses. Print hardcopies of your catalogue and ask them to go to website for demonstartion. Use the website as a mean of communicating the product. Such materials like: Operating manual, demonstration of use and application, References to Regulatory guidelines, such as the Food Safety from the Ministry of Health for dosage of Vitamins and minerals.
There are the do nots such as: not to put too much frames in the page, as each frame is a webpage by itself, and they take up space. To keep your display window in tables will be better than frames. If you can afford, hire a Professional Web Designer, but if you want one piece job, then get it off the shelf. However you must maintain the website, keep it alive, update with new materials and throw away old ones. Do a re-invention once every year at least, some do it every season. Let your audience know that there is someone behind the website all the time. Never leave an unanswered question or inquiry for more than 48 hours.
There are lots more about a corporate website with cookies, spy-ware, push technology for the router and data mining and business intelligence... but this should be sufficient for home-base online business for now.
Street Smart
