 |
 |
 |
 |
Navigation:
|
|
Your Home Business and the WebWhen setting out to establish your web presence, the key is persistence. Be ready to work hard at building your Home Business on the internet because you have to build relationships with your customers and fellow Home Business owners by building a good reputation, which is really done one customer at a time. If you have a satisfied customer, most of the time they will buy from you again and again, even if it is different products. Things begin with your web site, of course. When building your website for your Home Business, there are a few steps you should remember. First of all, start with a clean design and make your site easy to navigate. One way of doing this is to have a site map. Make it easy to move around your site from every page. Ease of navigation is essential because if your customers get confused they won't buy, and they won't come back. There are too many other sites out there that will be glad to help them out. Another essential point to keep in mind when you are building your site is to keep images to a minimum so that your site has a fast loading time. Recent studies have shown that web surfers do not tolerate slow sites any more, if they ever did. The slower the site, the faster the potential customer is out of there. They will hit the back button on their browser and leave skid marks doing it. Once your site is built you will need to decide who is going to host it. This is important because reliabilty is a key factor. I do not personally recommend free hosts but if you must go with one here are a few things you should know. There are now many free web hosts available on the internet, and each one seems to have a unique benefit as well as specific limitations to be aware of. One free Hosting service which will provide you with free hosting is Catalog.com. Like Amray and doteasy, they provide free hosting if you register your domain with them. The price is $24.90 per year. Since you can buy a domain cheaper than that, one could argue that it is not really free. I can't really argue there. But they promote the deal as free hosting and there are no banners or pop-up ads of any kind unlike most of the totally free hosts such as Tripod. What does their "free" hosting include? 30 mb of disk storage(not bad), 500 mb of transfer or bandwidth(not great), 2 e-mail accounts, frontpage extensions, unlimited file transfer protocal and a secure socket layer in case you decide you want to upgrade and process credit card orders in the future. You do not get any scripts or database features. As a general rule, I can only recommend using free web hosting companies for personal pages and such things as selling your car, where you just need a free, disposable website. There are certain exceptions but for most business websites you really need a dedicated hosting company that gives you adequate time and support. Having said that, there are a number of free web hosts which are reliable and useful. And I can recommend such sites for business support sites or "doorway" pages and the like. Just not for an all-out business effort. I have used Tripod in the past for a doorway page. They are a typical free host. They put a banner on the top of each page you produce. Sometimes they also put a pop-up ad as well, and that can be annoying. But they are one of the easiest to set up as well as one of the most flexible of the free hosts. They are fully automated, you don't have to wait to be screened to be approved. You just need a valid e-mail address.(I eliminated 12mb.com because of their screening process, with them you must provide a pay e-mail). When you set up a page on Tripod it is then easy to submit your website for inclusion to Lycos and Hotbot thru 'Lycos Insite'. So that is an added plus for your web promotion efforts. But a negative is the fact that there is a lot of Java script Tripod puts at the top of your html source (for their ads) and this can really screw up yoursite ranking on some search engines, I have noticed. For me the main plus is their wide assortment of tools. You can use their easy-to-use html editor to create your webpages or upload files. They have also recently added Blog Builder.Create your own weblog with this tool. They have plenty of scripts and images, tutorials on such things as tables and web forms and a handy color code program where you choose the color and they give you the number-letter code for that color instantly. |
|
Disclaimer: This Home Business article may be reprinted on any website or ezine as long as their is a link back to home-business-match.com. |