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Build Small Business ECommerce
Web Site
How to build a small business e-commerce Website - Information, Aritcles and Books
Three factors go into building
a small business web site: Design,
Programming and E-Marketing.
Small business websites are most effective when all three of these
factors are considered before the website is built. You'll need
to decide on a design look & feel,
who your target audience is, what kind of content you want to
include, how you're going to organize the information, what kind
of navigation you want and what messages you want to get across
to your audience. You will then need to determine what kind of
marketing you plan to do when the site is built. Today, a small
business website is crucial in the businesses success. If you
have no website, or one that looks like it was designed and built
by a college student, you risk sending potential customers to
your competition. Let us build your small business e-commerce
website. Here are some good articles Oak Web Works has written
to help you with all of these issues:
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Where
Should My Website Live?
Understanding your various hosting options will allow you to
make the right decision for your unique business situation and
help you save time, money and energy.
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Website
Manifestation - 7 Steps to a Successful Site
If you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision
making power, or the head of your company, you are probably
bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how to
build or re-vamp your website . . .
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Build
a small business ecommerce website
Building a small business website is
as much an art as a science. If you've read the articles above,
you probably realize that there are a lot of considerations when
building a site. Look & feel, hosting, coding, marketing, site
features, and usability are all important to consider when Web building.
Fortunately, you don't need to do it yourself. We can help. We can
build a site for you from scratch, producing exactly what you need
to succeed online. Or we can take on some o of the work inv loved
in building your small business website. For instance, we can just
do the e-marketing, or just the design. Please consider Oak Web
Works for building your small business website.
What is E-Commerce?
E-Commerce is generally thought of as the ability
for a website to accept and process credit cards in exchange for goods
or services. ECommerce is also sometimes thought of as conducting
business over the Web. In the more traditional sense, e-commerce deals
with both accepting and processing credit cards where e-commerce software
lists prices for products or services, includes a shopping cart and
the ability to accept personal information and credit card information.
The actual processing of the credit card is done by a merchant account
that hooks into the site owner's bank account for the money to be
deposited. The combination of the shopping cart software and the merchant
account make up an e-commerce enabled website.
Our Approach and Methodology for building
an effective business e-commerce website
Website Manifestation - 7 Steps
to a Successful Site
If you are in business for yourself, an executive
with decision making power, or the head of your company, you are
probably bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how
to build or re-vamp your website and how to use it to your advantage
in business.
To be as successful as possible in your e-business,
you’ll need to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly
fuse the disciplines of design, technology and marketing. From conception
to reality, the process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary
approach.
The more time and effort you put into planning and
building your website, or revamping an existing one, the more successful
you’ll be. Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing
your business goals, your business will look more credible to all
the people visiting your site, and you’ll increase your bottom
line.
The following is a guide for building a new website.
It shows how a corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class
website, and it is the same step by step process that every organization,
no matter how small, should follow.
Step 1 – Discovery:
The first phase involves determining the scope of the project,
the timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations,
and your current human and technical resources.
Step 2 - Concept and Planning:
The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals,
types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due
date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is,
the demographics and psychographics of your visitors.
In this phase the architecture or organization of
the information that will be included on the site needs to be
planned as well. The most important part of this step is determining
your goals for the site. You need to ask yourself and any other
stake holders exactly what the new site ought to yield when completed.
What do you expect the site to do? What do you want to get out
of it? What messages do you want to convey to all the people who
will eventually view it? What are the priorities of the site in
terms of your business and making money? What types of people
will be using the site and what will they want to accomplish while
there?
Step 3 - Design Specifications:
This is when the look & feel and a visual design specification
are created. Here you’ll determine the fonts, colors and
size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount.
You’ll want to write specifications for the images you’ll
be using on the site as well. It’s also the time to decide
upon and design the technical infrastructure and architecture
of the site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine
what programming languages and databases will be used, if any,
and any other technical features your site will need.
One of the secondary benefits of following Step
3 is that you’ll have a document to refer back to later
on when adding to the site. If you hire a new Web person of company,
you can give them this design specification document for them
to follow whenever they work on your site
Step 4 – Production:
Before this phase begins, everyone who is involved in this project,
including people who give the final ‘ok’, need to
know that there will be a technical and look and feel design freeze
at this point. If any changes are needed during this point, then
those changes will be done in the next redesign.
The production phase can be broken down into three
areas and will include:
Step 4a - The design production:
The artistic look and feel design production, usability designing,
the navigation production, and image and button creation. The
homepage of the site and the inner page template both need the
new design applied to them. The homepage design may use the same
template the rest of the site uses, or it may be unique. If it
differs from the rest of the site, then make sure its look and
feel is very similar to the look and feel of the inner page template(s).
Also, if it differs, consider applying this entire step-by-step
guide to the homepage as well, treating it as a separate, but
related entity.
Step 4b - The technical production:
This entails the html coding, any other coding to contribute to
the functionality and the configuration of the server’s
environment. The technical aspects could also include any server
side coding in a major programming language, database design and
development, and site security measures.
Step 4c - The marketing production:
This area includes creating the homepage and pre-determined inner
pages to be search engine and index friendly. It also includes
the copy writing for every page. Any mechanisms for interacting
with the visitors will be produced here. For example, forms on
your site that asks users to give information are ways for a user
to interact with your site. Although the look & feel of the
form falls under ‘design’, and the actual mechanisms
that make the form work falls under ‘technology’,
the purpose of the forms will be very marketing-centric. What
you ask, how you store the data, and how you retrieve it and use
it later are all marketing issues that should be addressed in
this step.
Step 5 – Testing:
The produced site now must be loaded onto a staging area that
is exactly like the production environment, or made accessible
to testers only. During this phase, various people will test all
aspects of site, including functionality, spelling and grammar,
hyperlinks, and all other elements. This is often called the Quality
Assurance phase.
Step 6 – Publishing:
This phase is the push of the new site from staging to production.
Here the site is made live and is now on the World Wide Web.
Step 7 - E-marketing and maintenance:
Unless the site is marketed, it won’t matter how well-designed
or technically robust it is, no one will ever visit or use it.
Therefore, the final and ongoing phase entails implementing e-marketing
techniques, keeping the site’s content fresh, and making
continual adjustments based on site specific and customer research.
Whether you decide to tackle building a new website
yourself, or you choose to hire someone else to do it, the steps
outlined above ought to be followed. If you decide to do it yourself,
you’ll need to read up on graphic design and usability, Web
technologies and e-marketing.
If you hire an outside company to build a site for
you, ask them how they plan to accomplish it. Ask them if they have
a set method for building a new site or re-vamping an old one. If
they have a good system, it ought to look a lot like the steps above.
They ought to be proficient in all aspects of website development
and be able to communicate to you everything they are doing and
why. Remember, the better your site is initially and the better
you manage your new site going forward, the better your business
will be.
Article by Jason O'Connor
© 2004
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