Why you need a home page for your business

Why you might or might not need a home page for your self or business?

So!, you are all caught up in the hullabaloo about having your business represented on the World Wide Web. So what? Are you going to believe all this propaganda that your business will go under or fail to grow if you don’t have a professional web page address?

If you believe the advertisements, then by all means go for it and contract with a web designer to create and maintain you web page. Cost can vary from less than $200 to over $100,000 depending on how sophisticated or complex your web page will be. Then of course there is the $35 to $1,500 per month costs.

So, you spent the money and now have your own WWW.YOURNAME.COM web address. What Now? If you believe the commercials on Television that show a company that just put their web page and Order entry system on the web and away the orders go. Pretty soon they are glad that they use Federal Express or UPS to ship their product. Don’t believe them that It’s going to be that fast or easy to grow.

Do people just sit waiting in the weeds for your web address to show up and be there for them to Order products? Come on now, get real! Name recognition and advertising your web address so that users can find you are definitely required. Just installing a web page won’t do much for you unless people know it is there and how to get there.

Making sure that your web page is listed on many of the major search engines is fairly easy if you have a .COM or .ORG domain suffix. (Many search engines don’t search for the .NET .BIZ .TV and such suffixes) Most of the search engines use robotic computer programs that keep searching the internet for web pages and collecting the information in the source code contained on them into their database. Having good keywords on your web page heading is important as that is one way your page will get indexed and searched based on what keywords you use.

Using key words that are too generic will probably bury your web page address in a couple of hundred thousand listings and you will never receive top billing. There are some companies that swear that they will get you listed on the top search engines for money. BETTER NOT HOLD YOUR BREATH, SAVE YOUR MONEY.

There are a couple of different options for web pages, one being just a nicely designed web page that shows what products you either make or sell. Make sure that you have very clear references to your phone number address and contact persons. Placing an email address sometimes is not that great an advantage as some people expect that you will answer any email in less than 24 hours. So if you have an employee with lots of time on their hands to monitor E-mail on a constant basis, then go for it but expect that your listed email address will get on plenty of spam lists for junk email. The spamm’ers use robotic programs to scan web pages for email addresses just like the search engines build data bases of the data on your web page. Having “mail to:” with Your E-Mail address following is a sure sign that you will receive “wonderful” offers. Some Web designers have decided to put their email addresses in graphic format (like a .JPG) to foil the e-Mail harvester robots. Others have chosen to put the E-Mail address in hexadecimal representation on the web page so that your web Browser sees the address and will automatically open your E-Mail program and place the address In the TO: option of a new message but, the spam’ers normally won’t pick it up..

There are many well-designed web pages that are on the Web. Many also that are so graphic intensive that they take forever to load even if you have a broadband connection. There is only so much real estate on a users monitor, the more you put there, the more convoluted or busy it will appear. I feel that simple is better and especially if your looking for customers to actually read the information. You need to make it pretty simple and easy to navigate by using menu selection items on the top or left side of your home page. Similar to HTTP://WWW.CPCUG.ORG and HTTP://WWW.APCUG.ORG use, many others also do this.. Having a search option is nice for those who have a pretty good idea of what they are looking for. Having multiple pages with products or information stored in categories is a good idea that will reduce aggravation/frustration to your visitors.

Whether you are hosting a personal home page or a business site. It is a good idea to look at others who have spent the time to make their web site easy to use, pleasant to look at and all around a good job. I am not going to list any particular pages as either good or bad examples but going to the HTTP://WWW.CPCUG.ORG/USER web site would be a good start. The Member web pages in many cases run the gamut from the great to the good example of a poor example. None mentioned specifically. I have my own web page and I shamelessly have some of the best examples of the worst things to do on your web site. But, I do all my editing in Notepad and Personal Editor, so I can be excused from this example.

There are many good web page creator programs. Microsoft has Front Page which is a powerful program but does require that your ISP supports the Microsoft Front Page extensions. (Most do). Cheaper programs abound on the Internet in the Shareware and freeware area. Most of the popular word processors like Word Perfect and Microsoft Office allow you to create a document and then publish or save it as a web page. It has most of the necessary control codes for web browsers. That is a cheap and dirty method of creating a web page. Also you might remember that UPPER and lower case letters do make a difference in most web hosting systems. If you are serious about designing a web page for yourself then you might want to check with the CPCUG training director as we have a couple of experts in CPCUG that have taught web page authoring. We also have some professional web designers available for a fee. And, NO, I do not do web page designing, just check my web page out to find out why <G> (that’s a big grin)

OH! Yes, I forgot. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!!!

Rich Schinnell is a long time member of Capital PC User Group having been instrumental in getting it formed. Served in several positions of responsibility and helping many computer users. He consults to a few small business’s on networks and general office computers and software. Hopefully some have enjoyed his columns in the Monitor Magazine for CPCUG. He can be reached at schinnell@cpcug.org or by calling him at home at (301) 949-9292.

Permission to copy granted for non-profit user groups, all others must request permission.