Preparing Your Website
Just like a new business needs a business plan to succeed, a new website needs a website plan to achieve the best results.
Follow these steps to prepare your website’s content and focus.
Organise Content
Get writing! Content needs to be informative, concise and relevant to the purpose of your website.
Collate Information
Gather all of your business’ marketing materials and images that can be used in the design concept.
Meet with Us
Once you have organised your materials contact us for a free consultation to discuss your website direction.
Things To Know About Your Market
Market Research
Market research is essential offline and so often forgotten online. We’ve seen the recent phenomenon of the thousands of dot-coms collapsing, and many because their preparation was not thorough enough.
Even if you have a highly successful product offline it doesn’t always mean that it will automatically translate into a highly successful product online. The Internet is a different arena and needs to be understood prior to entering.
Your preparation should be as detailed as when you started your offline business with a written business plan, S.W.O.T. analysis, financial details and finally an action plan.
Target Markets
“Who is my target market?” will arguably be the most important question you must ask yourself in your website preparation. Knowledge of your target market is needed from the very beginning because it will be implicated in every corner of your website.
The design, structure and language used must all appeal to this target market. It would be unwise to set up a BMW dealership that solely advertised on 18–25 channels, and similarly it is unwise to be unappealing to your target market online.
Language Barriers
Beyond your target market, you must look at whether you want to extend your market share in the local market place, or if you would like to attract global customers. Are you perhaps just trying to service your existing customers better?
If a website owner wishes to attract global customers, it is important to analyse and understand alternative language for your product. For example, what we in Australia might call a “Beachfront Apartment” may be known overseas as various many other things; bungalows, villas, condos, condominiums and havanas.
Payment and Shipping Burdens
Payment in foreign currencies, credit card fraud and expensive postal costs are all unfortunate realities of doing business over the Internet. These factors are an important consideration when analysing the potential success of your product overseas. Will the price of posting your product be too much for a customer?
The recent fall of dot-coms selling wine can be seen as a perfect example of this problem. Three Australian online wine retailers closed this year as a result of their lack of profitability. If you consider that customers had to pay for the shipping of a reasonably heavy product by mail standards (bottles and cases of wine) and wait the week for the product’s delivery, it is reasonable that customers might choose to instead visit their local bottleshop instead of paying extra for the postage, and waiting an unreasonable length of time.
Integration With Offline Business
It is undoubtedly beneficial to provide customers with product and company information, and it proves to be a highly effective internet marketing tool so often forgotten by web developers and owners alike who prefer their site to be pretty rather than functional.
We’re Here To Help
The strength of a website is determined by its ability to increase operational efficiency. If you would like some assistance at any stage of your website preparation, cityofcairns.com can guide you to make the correct choices for your website in line with your industry and type of operation.
We have had many years experience and have seen many online operations work, and sadly we’ve seen many fail. This is a free service in conjunction with the development of a website with us.
If you would like to arrange a time to talk, or simply speak with someone who can help you make an informed decision, please email us at info@cityofcairns.com or phone (07) 4033 7811. We are happy to chat to anyone about their website.