Every business is unique and your website should complement your current business focus.
Strategy 1: The Business Card - Quick to develop, low cost, allows your business to experience the benefits of having a web presence.
Strategy 2: The Online Brochure - An online sales presentation, this site will often look identical to your sales brochure containing mostly advertising text. Also known as a lead generating website as it can be used to collect names and phone numbers from interested prospects.
Strategy 3: The informative expert - This site is designed to be a resource site, and should position the business as an expert in the topic of the site. Over time this type of site will be found fairly easy by search engines.
Strategy 4: Interactive, Entertaining and Viral (Web 2.0) - Sites built around this strategy are designed to capture the peoples attention and hold onto it for a long time. This type of strategy requires considerable upkeep, also referred to as web 2.0.
Before you begin building your site you should have a clear strategy in place as your site should be designed to perform a beneficial function on your behalf. For example, are you going to use the site to teach prospects about your business, are you trying to build a list you contact via email or a phone list to call? Are you trying to build your brand name by creating a well written, informative blog? You will receive the most benefit from your site if you design your site to benefit you.
Strategy No. 1: The Business Card
If your a one man shop, want to stay small and only need a handful of leads annually the business card strategy would work for you. You can get this type of site done quickly and it won’t cost you a lot. As you begin to see the benefits of having a professional web presence this site can easily be added to later.
The “business card” site is a one or two page sight that has your logo, contact information, your slogan, a list of services and a couple of pictures.
Strategy No. 2: The online brochure
This is by far the most common type of site. This type of site lists your companies services, pictures of current completed projects, FAQ page, tells a short story, and encourages prospects of the website to contact the company. Also known as lead generation websites - this type of site will contain 5-15 pages should cost less than a $1000 to get built and hosted.
Strategy No. 3: The informative expert
The goal of this strategy is to position you as the expert in your local community. People tend to be attracted to authority figures. This type of site will educate and teach your visitors. There will be lots of original, informative articles, special reports and a blog or other community feature. Try to get people from within your company to contribute to the site. The blog will not only help to establish you as an authority figure, but will also be a source of traffic for your site since they are loved by search engines.
Strategy No. 4: Web 2.0 - interactive, entertaining and viral
Web 2.0 means that your sites are tapping into the social networking sites that have exploded onto the scene in the last few years. The most popular of the social networking sites are MySpace, Facebook, You Tube, etc. These sites are flooded with people who like to share cool and useful things with their friends. The goal is to tap into the word-of-mouth sharing, as people begin to share your site your traffic and sales grow.
This type of site is loaded with videos, audio, articles, blog posts, discussion boards and surveys. This type of site requires considerable upkeep and maintenance.
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