This year more than ever it has been. Italian to grab every single sales opportunity with both hands. Many businesses have really struggled and ongoing business is vital in order for them to keep going. If you do not have a website or have a very basic site you may be missing out on a huge amount of sales. If you have a product or service which can be sold online then you should have an e-commerce website to accommodate this. Year upon year more and more people buy items online and this year has seen a bigger increase than ever. I’m even if your product is aimed at an older audience that may not do as much online shopping, they may well ask a relative to buy something online for them on their behalf. After the initial outlay for the website, you will probably find that there is not a huge ongoing monthly cost and that often you only pay more when you are earning more.  You don’t have to go to the expense of getting a merchant account and using a payment gateway like Sage Pay etc, you can use PayPal or similar which is often lot easier to interstate and although their fees are higher you only pay when you make a sale.

Designing and developing a website can have large financial implications for any business so it is important to make sure it is as effective as possible at targeting potential clients. This group of people who you consider to be specifically interested in your products and services are the people who you want to find your website amongst the abundance of websites out there but how do you make your website more effectively attract clients?

When you are in the process of designing your website having a meeting with a good web designer to discuss your options is an excellent place to start as they will be able to advise you on the most effective way to promote your business. Your marketing budget can be discussed, and most web designers will be able to provide a website to fit your budget. It is important at this meeting to identify who your target client group are and discuss your ideas for how to direct your clients to the relevant pages of your site.

A web developer will be able to advise you on the SEO that can be utilised on the site so that your site is ranked higher when visitors are searching for products or services.

In order to have a website it is necessary to have a hosting account. This could be a single dedicated server or more commonly one that is shared with other website accounts. Cloud hosting on the other hand is when data is spread across a number of different servers in different places which are all connected together. There is a virtual server that accesses this data, but it only exists in the virtual environment or cloud as it is known. So, what are the advantages of using this type of hosting for a website?

One of the chief benefits seen by businesses is the improved security that cloud hosting provides. It is far easier to protect a cloud network from cyber threats as the data is held in a central location rather than a dedicated server. Another benefit is that the data can easily be recovered should there be a failure in any devices accessing the cloud.

The flexibility of cloud hosting is seen as a definite advantage to a new business. As the business grows and possibly increases the number of employees, the demand for capacity rises so cloud hosting allows for the business needs fluctuating over time without additional costs to the business.

A website is an extremely powerful selling tool. Some businesses do not have a physical shop or showroom and therefore rely totally on their website to produce sales.

You may find yourself constantly checking where your website ranks for your most popular keywords in the search engine results as this will impact the number of visitors you get to your site. The higher you appear on the search engines result such as Google the more traffic you are likely to get. Although it is important to track this you should also check what your visitors are doing once they land on your site. If you are receiving a fair amount of traffic to the site but are not benefitting from enquiries or sales then it may be time to revisit the content within your website and have a look at what is happening. You may find that one of the pages is not displaying properly or that maybe your products are priced too high in comparison with the competition. There are some great analytics packages out there that will track the flow of customers through your website showing you what pages they clicked through to and also which pages they left on. This can be vital information which you can use to improve your site.

Website marketing is essential to ensure that your site receives traffic and you can gain sales or enquiries. There are a huge number of different ways in which you can market your website and it can be tricky to know which ones will work best for you. Many business owners may wonder why they are not getting much traffic to their website as soon as it goes live, but it takes time for the search engines to index the site and during this time you may need to do other forms of marketing if you wish to.

Google say that it can take up to six weeks for a site to be indexed but usually it will happen quicker than this, although you may see your pages appearing in dips and drabs. There are also things you can do to try and speed this up such as creating a site map of all your pages and submitting it to Google.

Even a site that has been built with SEO in mind will need to be regularly updated. You need to add new relevant content on to your website in order to improve your rankings. Google likes to see that you are offering your customers the best experience and if there is new content being added it shows that you are trying to offer up to date information.