West Coast Designers for the Internet
www.westcoastdesigners.com

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Simple! It offers you an opportunity to expand your business like never before possible. The The World Wide Web offers an extraordinary opportunity for business owners. It can greatly enhance your traditional advertising, such as the radio, television, yellow pages, etc., by vastly expanding the number of potential customers you reach. There are many millions of reasons for a web site. There is an estimated 200 million people online in the US and Canada, with 2 million new users every month.

The average user is online almost 8 hours per month. The spending stats for 2003 show a total of between $180 to $200 billion spent online, and growing at a rate of 30% to 50 %, even while bricks and mortar stores struggled. This means, your clients are using the internet more frequently on a daily basis. Want to let the world know about your business or organization? The internet is selling for you, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

With a web site you are creating an online brochure that will help potential clients and customers, learn about your company, and look at it in the most favorable light. You are trying to enhance your brand or organization image. You want people to know who you are, what you do, where to find you. A constant showcase of everything your group or business has to offer. Why should you limit your business? A web site is the world's most effective and affordable method of marketing. Your website will encourage potential customers to contact you by phone, mail or e-mail, and purchase your product and/or service any time of the day.

I am not saying you should spend all your efforts into selling your wares on the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you certainly should be considering it. Just that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers , potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out about your business or services, you have to offer.

One of the great things about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. You only have one shot at making a good impression. You may be a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a web site, size doesn't matter. If you are a one man show or a 10,000 employee corporate giant, if you don't have a web site you are loosing business to other companies that do. With a well designed web site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The opposite is also true. I have seen many big company web sites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

Many people research their needs at night on the Internet like never before, even while you may be sleeping. Don't miss out on having your business available to your potential customers at their convenience.

Why I Need a Web Site

Have you ever gone into a doctors office waiting room and noticed the couch was a bit shabby? Maybe there was an ash tray with ashes! Cookie crumbs and candy wrappers from yesterday, or even girlie magazines! How would you feel about that doctor treating you?
Hopefully we would never see such a thing. But what if? There is a strong message being sent, about what kind of person the doctor appears to be. Yet you have not even met him. What would you do?

I personally would walk out the door, never even waiting to see the doctor. Right or wrong, my mind would be made up. Advertising is much the same way. Every individual and his business is represented to the public by a business appearance and what it has to say.

A web site on the Internet has even more power to influence the public then a store front or other written advertising. People want to do business with a company that is successful. A very clean professional web site reflects success, conveying the impression your company is larger and has more resources and employees, then is actually the case. In other words the Internet can be the great equalizer, leveling the playing field in your favor.

Yet daily I see small companies losing this great advantage by using part time students or someone's son, who is mainly "a gamer", to design the web site. Sometimes the site even looks fairly good on their computer. But they have no way of knowing how it will look on other computers on the Internet, with so many different browsers in use today. (More about this subject next month). An amateur web site sends the message the company could not afford to do more. Or, possible that the owner has really bad taste. Or it may reflect on his lack of education.

These are lasting impressions and they will seldom go away. One more important point to close with is, a poorly designed web site can give an impression that the viewer shouldn't have confidence in you or your product. Remember with web design as with most other advertising you have only seconds to give a lasting first impression.

Some browsers are not as sympathetic to web designers as others. It can also be due to unwanted extra code written by an HTML editing program such as Micro-Soft Frontpage. Or the web editing program may not be compatible with all browsers. Also lack of knowledge regarding how a web page actually loads and how a browser reads what is displayed.

How do you protect yourself? A good web designer must put his or her big pants on and test the daylights out of your site! Seriously, browser incompatibility testing is one of the most underrated and overlooked aspects of web development, yet at the same time one of the most important.

The time to start testing a site for compatibility is not when the site is completed, instead it should be included as the pages of the site are being created. It is not a glamorous or popular job for the web designer, but it is the mark of a professional.

Some of the most typical browser incompatibilities include: Font sizing problems, margin alignment, java script errors, color and more color, and gaps between images.

Downloading is also included in browser incompatibility problems. If a page takes over 20 seconds to load, it is questionable if your visitor will wait to see your wonderful new web site. Which means that you will want to make adjustments and possibly use more compression on images and graphics.

All the links should also be tested. Of course proof reading is a must. Font size must be checked, because Windows operating systems show fonts sizes larger than Macintosh browsers, because each platform deals with fonts sizes differently.

Here is a list of some of the various browsers your web site needs to be compatible with. Windows Internet Explorer 6, 5.5, 5.0, 4.5, 4.0.

Netscape 6.0 or higher, Netscape 4.0, Netscape 4.xx. America On Line 6.0, 5.0, 4.0,Opera 5.0,Omniweb 4.0, iCab, Linux.

I am flipping through the back pages of a travel magazine, there are dozens of pages of small ads for bed and breakfasts, hotels, attractions for tourists, even resturants. Most of them featured a web site address. The small ad is used just to interest the reader, while the web site can give the complete details of your business and ordering information.This method of placing a small ad in traditional media has become extremely popular. Half of North America is on line, with other countries catching up as fast or even faster! Commercials tout your main message while your web site fills in all the details and takes the order. Quick, less expensive media advertising does double-duty thanks to the Internet!

Featuring your web site URL on your business cards and mailouts is a must. Although newspaper advertising can be expensive, a small cheap one inch ad displayed in a Sunday issue can bring results over time. Include a compelling offer like a coupon, special price, and of course you can offer instant ordering.

Newspaper or magazine ads that do not feature a web site URL almost look bare. Even radio commercials and telephone books and telephone hold messages, feature info on the company's web site.

Traditional media offers you established audiences of all sizes, targeted to every imaginable group. it does not take long before your web site is receiving visitors, more then you ever imagined.