In today’s world, if you are in business, and you want people to take you seriously, then you need a website. The common response to needing a web site is to just throw up a couple of pages about who you are and what you do and then hope for the best. Unfortunately, because everyone and their aunt does that, your website tends to look and feel like everyone else’s, and your results end up being less than stellar in their performance. Before you put your first page out on the Internet, it is important to have a well-planned Internet Business Strategy. To improve your chances of receiving more exposure and business for your website, you should know these 5 important things before you ever begin to design your first web page.

1) Who is your target audience?
This isn’t just the generic term like "my target audience is people with money to spend", but who is your target audience really? What are their likes and dislikes? What kind of words and phrases are their “hot buttons”? What are their fears, and what kinds of problems do they have? What services to they require in addition to yours? If you don’t have an answer to any one of these questions, then you don’t really know your target audience enough to target your website specifically to them.

2) What makes you different than anyone else in your field?
You are a unique individual and have your own special way of serving your clients. Why would someone want to do business with you instead of your competition? Remember, people buy experiences along with the product or service. What is unique about your customer’s experiences with you? Can you articulate that? If not, you need to be able to do this because you will need to put this on your website.

3) How do you want people to find you?
This can be a 2-part question. If you want people to find you through the Internet, and via search engines, then you need to know what search terms your audience is using. Not what you THINK they are using, but what they are ACTUALLY using. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a list of search terms from clients that they want to optimize their website only to later discover that their target market doesn’t even search for the terms they optimized their site for. Sure, the terms may sound reasonable off the top you your head, but that may not be where their target market is coming from. Investing in a decent keyword research tool will pay for itself within the first year.

4) What do you want people to do once they get on your website?
This is the biggest and most important thing that you will want to have clarity about. It doesn’t matter how many people come to your website. If they don’t take the action you want them to take, then all of your efforts are lost. You will need to be clear about what action you want them to take and when. Make it as easy as possible for them to take that action and don’t make them work for it, or you will lose them. You should limit the number of things people can do on your website if you are using your website as a lead-generator, or to sell something from. The more choices you give them, the higher the chance that they will do nothing. People can’t be inundated with choices or they will just leave your site.

5) How do you want to lead people through your website?
There is a flow that you may want to take people through when they get to your website. What is the flow? You will want to understand and know what that flow is, and what to do when people come to your website in the middle of the flow. How will you guide the through in that case? Once you have your flow, you will know how to set up your website and where to place your navigation links, and call to action.

Understanding and getting clear on the things you need to know before you begin designing your first web page will save you time and money in the long run. Time from having to redo things and money in losing out on sales you could have made if you had set your website up to maximize returns in the first place. If you haven’t done these things yet, it is never too late to start.

Here is a guest article from a client. He is a big advocate of content management systems and his company is great for Denver video production

Most Biotech firms have an existing website often used to share their mission statement, investment goals and unique research opportunities and technologies. Unfortunately websites often become outdated, irrelevant, or out of touch with current technologies. Many times it takes only small text changes to update and keep a website relevant. Often this means requesting changes to be made by your website designer, web development firm or in-house IT department. In many cases, although the request for these kind of changes seem simple, web professionals are usually scheduled on other imminent tasks and small changes cannot be a top priority on their list.

That's where the beauty of a Content Management System comes into play. Almost any website, even those using technologies like interactive Flash components can be integrated into a Content Management System often referred to as a CMS. Having a website with a CMS makes keeping your website up-to-date a snap! By accessing the website with a secure username and password, any designated employee can log into the administrative area of the website. The administrative area of the website allows you to add, remove and edit pages, as well as the ability to add and remove photos. Changes made to the website are instant and live on the Internet after saving. The entire experience is easy and graphical; any user who is familiar with Microsoft Word can update your new website!

Conversion to a CMS takes approximately 60-90 days depending on the complexity of a website. Although conversion to a CMS may incur some expense—most businesses find that they will not need to touch the layout and design of their website for a several years, until a major overhaul is needed or rebranding. In the meantime, you will be in complete control of all your content changes—with no delays or challenges. For more information email: daniel@gomoso.com or call 303 910-0456.

We have all see these deals from time to time "Lifetime Web Hosting! Pay one price for the lifetime of your account!" On the surface the deal seems to be good. But is it? There are several questions you should ask yourself before you consider such a deal, because you may not get your money's worth out of it, and you may experience some other unfortunate consequences. So how do you know if lifetime web hosting is right for you?

1. How long will you have your web hosting account?

The first question to ask yourself is how long will you have a hosting account for the particular site you are building? The way most lifetime hosting offers work is they determine how long (in months) an average customer stays with their company and multiply that number by their monthly selling price for a web hosting account. They will then use that number to determine how much to charge as a one time hosting fee.



If you are only planning to have your account for 1 year or less, it probably isn't worth it to purchase a lifetime web hosting account, as you will be charged a premium for your hosting account.



If you plan on keeping your account for more than 2 or 3 years, it may be worth the price, but you will have to answer the following questions to see if a lifetime hosting account is really for you.

2. Is your web site going to require a lot of resources?

If you plan on having a web site that has a high amount of traffic, or will actively use a database, you may want to re-think your purchase. Companies that sell lifetime hosting accounts make money from you once, but their expenses happen every month. As a result, they have to continue to sell lifetime web hosting accounts in order to make enough income to pay their expenses, which gives them a strong motive to minimize.



One of the expenses, is server space and capacity. The more servers a web hosting company has, the more their monthly expenses are. One way to reduce their expenses, is to put more hosting accounts on a server than it can reasonably handle with the expectation that most websites will not use the full capacity of their account. Many times, these servers are oversold on space and bandwidth (think of an airline selling more tickets than they have seats for a specific flight).



The result is that sites on these servers tend to be slower than average, and if you have a site that has a lot of traffic, many of your visitors may have trouble getting to your site, and will leave before your web page shows up in their browser.



If this situation isn't important to you, the next question is certainly one you should be asking yourself.

3. What is the refund policy of the hosting company?

Since many of the servers in these lifetime hosting companies are overloaded, they usually take a zero tolerance policy on any web site that causes any extra load on the server, which may cause it to crash, and it can be a one strike and your out, with no refund.



On over-extended servers, (servers with more hosting accounts on them than they have capacity for), it is very easy to create an overload on the server. It can be as simple as having a lot of page views from the traffic the website gets, or having your blog attacked by a bunch of robot scripts trying to post comment spam to your blog. There is nothing you can do about it in these cases, but it can cause a server that is already at it's limit, to crash.



If this happens after only 6 months into your web hosting contract, you may be totally out of luck and have your site shut down with no refund. In this case, it would have been a very expensive hosting service. Be sure to check the terms of service before purchasing this type of hosting.

4. Do you expect a high level of customer service?

The quality of the customer service goes along with the theme of reducing expenses. One of the first places most customers experience in expense cutting is the level of customer service. Much of the time, customer service is outsourced and overseas. There may be language barriers to contend with as well as some delays in getting your questions answered, and problems resolved. Sometimes you may have to deal with less experienced hosting administrators, but by no means do you find the less experienced customer service representatives only in the lifetime web hosting arena.



This is an important factor to consider because if the customer service is really bad, you may be forced to leave the hosting company and walk away from your entire hosting investment. Be sure to get as much information as you can about the particular company you are considering, especially their level of customer service and their technical competency.





When asking the question, "Is lifetime web hosting right for me?" you want to determine what kind of site you plan on having, and how you plan to use it (will there be heavy traffic or not?), how long you plan on having your web site up, and some other factors such as how important are things such as customer service to you. In a limited number of circumstances, lifetime web hosting can be a deal as it is better than free hosting, but if you step outside of the limited situations, you may end up paying a lot more than you bargained for.

Look for resource sites to help you with deciding how to pick your web hosting.
Are you confused about all of this online and web hosting stuff?
B. Hopkins of http://psiphonconsulting.com Internet Business Developers answers these questions. You can also go to http://Yourecommercesite.com where you will find more information and reviews about ecommerce and Internet services.
http://www.yourecommercesite.com.
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Keywords: Web Hosting, Website

There are many wine and winery related web sites available on the web. It now becomes increasingly important to stand out from the crowd of websites. There are many things that wine websites can do to make their websites stand out and make the visitors come back again and again to their site. Things that can be done to keep visitors coming back include adding forums, a blog, or a lot of articles. While these solutions are good, they can be quite time intensive and require some effort to maintain.

This article is going to talk about some of the quick things wine-related sites can do to make their sites sticky, that don't require a lot of effort and are easier to maintain, if any maintenance is required at all.

1. Add a Featured Monthly Wine

At a minimum of every month, add a featured wine of the month that you place on your front page. You can use wines that have won awards in different states or countries. If you really want to cater to your visitors, you should find out where most of your visitors come from and feature the wine from that country. It is relatively easy to find out where your visitors come from through tracking software that is available on the Internet. Once you decide on a wine, you can really add value by including information about the region the wine came from and even a little bit about the winery the wine came from. You'll be surprised at how willing some winery owners will be willing to provide you with information about their winery if it means additional exposure for them.

2. Allow Your Visitors to Vote on a Featured Wine

Should you decide to feature a monthly wine, you could allow your website visitors to vote on the featured wine. The wine with the most votes would be the one you feature. You can make it easy and provide a multiple choice of no more than 5 to 6 wines to choose from. Place the poll on the front page of your website where it is easily seen. There are a lot of scripts available on the web today that are free and can allow you to put this feature on your site relatively quiclky.

3. Add a Winery Search Function to Your Website

Another thing that can add value to your site is giving the ability for your visitors to search for wineries. There are sites like officialwinery.com that allow website owners to place code they provide on their own website, and visitors will be able to search the extensive winery database available on officialwinery.com. Visitors will come back often to find wineries in their own area, or areas they may visit on a trip. Adding this type of code to your wine or winery site is rather quick and easy and can be done within 5 minutes.

There are many things a wine-related website owner can do to make their website sticky, and keep the visitors coming back. Some things are relatively simple, yet they can make a big difference in the effectiveness of the website. Visitors love ease and convenience and website owners can do things that can quickly and easily deliver these features. These features can be done on your own, or found as scripts in the Internet. Spice up your site today and keep those visitors coming back.
B. Hopkins from http://Psiphonconsulting.com, a website development company, helps businesses build their web presence on the internet.
http://mywinesnow.com.
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Keywords: wine website, wine marketing