Getting Your Brick and Mortar Business Online is Easier Than You Think

Getting your business online, no matter what it is you do or sell, is essential in this day and age. It has become a matter of survival rather than a matter of choice as it wasn’t past. Even as many business owners are becoming more and more tech savvy, venturing onto the Internet can still be a daunting task for some. However, as someone who built the first website in 1995, I can tell you it is nowhere near as difficult as it used to be.

Feel free to click the links in the section below to visit other hubs which will tell you little bit more about each of the subjects highlighted.

When I started on the Web, you had to code all of your site’s HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) by hand in a text editor and upload it to your web host’s server via an FTP connection. It was incredibly meticulous and unless you took the time to learn a decent amount of HTML, your site was bound to look like crap no matter what you did.

As the technology developed, WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get) such as Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver, as well as third-party software developed web hosts themselves made it a lot easier to make a decent looking website. These tools are great for slapping together a website as simply as cutting and pasting. You still do have to know a little HTML to tweak things so the overall look is okay and you also still have to mess with an FTP client (or at least configure your editor to upload via FTP to your host server) but they are a far cry from trying to build a site in WordPad.

However, most of the sites you can easily create with those editors are static, unchanging, and you have to update the whole page if you want to change something as simple as a misspelling.

Nowadays all you need to get online is a cheap web host, and some great free content management system software.

There several cheap web host out there to choose from. The biggest and probably most popular is www.godaddy.com. Another is www.bluehost.com. Both offer fairly similar services:

1) Simple user interfaces

2) An array tools such as web hosted email accounts and traffic monitoring applications that just about anybody can learn to use.

3) Some advertising options to draw traffic to your site, etc.

One of the most important things that both services offer is the ability to purchase a unique domain name. This is essential when you’re trying to build a business into a brand online. By having a website with your company’s name in it, you virtually guarantee that when a customer goes online to find you, you will be easily found. There’s a hot market in domain names and the buying and selling is a lucrative business. Stand out in the crowd and safeguard your company’s name by snagging your custom domain name while you can.

I personally host both of my websites: www.therealrobertpalmer.com and www.myedar.org through GoDaddy. There service costs me roughly five dollars per month and the two domain names only cost me twenty bucks each.

Content Management Systems do just what they sound like they do: allow you to manage the content on your website. They are great tools that allow anyone to easily create visually appealing and functional website in seconds. The software tools are not only freely available and very powerful they are simple enough to be used by even beginners. They allow for easy modification of any website by simply logging in to the control panel via visiting a URL.

While there are many content management systems out there such as Drupal, Joomla, and Vivvo the most powerful and easy-to-use his WordPress. You can download WordPress for free at www.WordPress.org and install it to your web host server in minutes via FTP, or, if your web host has one click install enabled, simply visit your web host’s control panel and press a button.

One of the other cool things about WordPress is that there are thousands of freely available templates to choose from with which you can customize the look and feel of your site to make it your own. Unlike the old days when you had to tap code into your text editor and guess what your final site would look like, CMSs allow you to create and preview a great looking site without ever having to know any computer language.

WordPress is an open source piece of software which means that anybody who knows how to edit the computer code can change how WordPress will looks, function, and feels. Those coders have created a thriving community around WordPress and there are also thousands of freely available widgets and plug-ins to choose from which add functionality, user friendliness, and revenue-generating capabilities to your website.

With WordPress you can build anything from a static site, similar to those you can build with FrontPage, to a blog.

These powerful content management systems have made it easy for anybody to build a stylish and attractive website that is not only easy to use but can also offer very powerful web development tools to build your business’s income through exposure and web traffic.

If you’re still not convinced that you can build your own website, there are plenty of freelancers out there willing to help you for cheaper than you would imagine.  Whether you need a graphic designer to build you a header graphic, a coder to make a custom registration form, or a writer to fill your page with flowing prose that just tickles your customers so much that they open up their wallets and hand you cash, you can find them on outsourcing sites such as www.elance.com, www.rentacoder.com, www.scriptlance.com.

Most won’t charge you anywhere near as much as you would have to pay if you went through an agency and you get the satisfaction of helping out another small business owner as well.

Here are a couple of great tips from Don Campbell, owner of Expand 2 Web (www.expand2web.com.)

Use Google Local business Search to add your businesses profile to Google Maps. I did it right after I read Don’s newsletter and it literally took me five minutes.

Use Yahoo Local search to create a business profile as well. Yahoo local is great because it allows your clients to post reviews of your products and services which builds old fashioned word of mouth advertising in a digital fashion.

Also, don’t forget to include your website in any of your traditional advertising media as well. Have the name printed on your business cards, brochures, take-out menus, letter head, circular flyers, etc. By introducing traditional customers to your digital persona you are not only making it easier for them to stay in touch (and engaged) with you and your products but also making it easier for them to introduce you to new customers as well.

Thank you for your time and if I can help you with anything, please feel free to drop me a note.