By John Lopez
If you have a home-based business, you absolutely must invest in an effective website.
Whether you decide to build it yourself or hire someone to build it for you, your website says everything about your business and the products you are trying to sell.
Potential customers will form an opinion of your business in the first few seconds they view your website. You don’t want to scare anyone away simply because this was an area you decided to skimp on.
You can get a professional-looking website that you put together yourself. Free website design sites offer a huge number of templates, many of which are geared to a specific kind of business.
Before you plunk down any cash for a domain name and web hosting fees, sit down and plan out your website. These are some questions you should ask yourself:
—What do you want your website to do? Is it merely an informational site for your product? Or are you going to need to allow people to pay for products via your site.
—Is your site considered a virtual store? Will you need a shopping cart?
—How many pages do you think you’ll need?
—Do you want a chat room? These can be a great way to generate leads. When someone signs up for a chatroom, they are clearly interested in your product, and so you’ve just gotten a lead.
—Do you plan to offer a blog?
Once you’ve decided on the basics, start cruising the net. Look at your competitor’s websites with an objective eye. What are they doing right and what are they doing wrong?
These are all things you need to consider before you make the leap into website land. Once you know what you want and need on your website, then you can go look for website building sites that can offer you everything you want.
Remember, some free websites, especially those that come with free hosting, do not offer the ability for you to have chat rooms, some look like they are home-grown efforts, many have banners or popups that have nothing at all do with what you are trying to promote or sell, and some do not allow you to have your own domain name.
Look for the free website development sites allow you to develop a website, then charge a nominal web hosting fee. These websites are pretty customizable, down to text and pictures and are extremely simple to put together. The websites can have blog links or Paypal payment choices, but they do tend to be limited in the number of pages. Most have hundreds of layout choices so you can avoid having your website look like your competitors’.
Most sites are simple to use and you do not need to know htlm language to build them.
Remember, if you don’t feel comfortable building your own website, then by all means, hire someone to do it for you. Your website is an extension of you and your home-based business, it’s a first impression that gets that customer through the door and a well-designed site can make them sit down and stay awhile.
John Lopez is the owner of Cash-Passive.com and writes on a variety of subjects. To learn more about starting your own home based business earning 6 streams of income, visit: http://www.cash-passive.com/pips
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }