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Five Keys to Successfully Bringing your Business Online

See? We told you. Five keys! As you know, when making any change or transition with your business, it’s important to ensure that the process is carefully planned and executed. This holds true when you make the leap to having a business presence on the Internet. Sure, it’s possible to just pay a local kid $100 to put together a quick few pages about your business, with some pictures or maybe a little map showing your retail location. However – like anything else, a job done incorrectly now can cause a waste of time and money long into the future.

There are a few (five! we promise) key things that you may want to keep in mind when introducing your business to the online world:

1) Ensure your site is built with an industry-standard Content Management System or CMS – we can’t stress how important this is. There is absolutely nothing that will annoy you more than having a website that’s difficult or impossible to make changes to. With a CMS you are able to quickly login through a standard web browser to a graphical backend to your website. From here you will be able to edit any of the site’s content and usually you will be able to edit the design and layout as well. Gravytrain builds our clients’ sites on the WordPress platform, which powers tens of millions of webpages and weblogs around the world.

2) Do not sign an agreement with your website designer that locks you in to using their services - if you end up wanting to use another company for whatever reason, or if you become dissatisfied with your designer, or web host, you will become very frustrated. There’s no need to be locked in to your website company for a lengthy contract term. Gravytrain especially recommends reading any fine print (we don’t use fine print!) you encounter in your service agreement that may end up costing you “nickel-and-dime” fees for virtually everything. Want the specials on the front page changed? Ding. Want to add some new staff profiles to your site? Ding. Keep your eyes peeled for the fine print!

3) Remember that this is now your new “first impression” – you need the site to be professional and to reflect your business. The details matter very much when it comes to websites. It’s wise to spend a bit of extra cash on a photographer if you want pictures of your business taken. Your website is going to only be as good as the weakest piece of content on it, so if you’re out there with a $60 digicam taking shots in the rain, your entire site will reflect that. If you’d like to have your staff members featured on your site, ensure that their headshots are taken professionally and that their attire is what you want to reflect in your business. You’ll get no opportunity to communicate directly with website visitors to give them the “pitch” – so your site has to be good enough to hook them to convert from prospects to clients. Having said this, the most important part of your new first impression is Number 4…

4) Get a proper website domain name. Please. – Aim for the .com or the country base (like gravytrain.ca where .ca is Canada) for your business. Internet users have started to develop a taste for top-level domains and what they feel the site attached to them is going to contain. If your site is burnabyflorist.ca or burnabyflorist.com, it will have a much better perception than burnabyflorist.info, burnabyflorist.biz or even weirder domains like burnabyflorist.cc. Because of the way the search engines rank websites, it is important to have keywords inside your domain name that reflect your business. www.burnabyweddingflorist.com is going to rank higher for a different search term than www.burnabyflowersandgifts.com. Also note that domains are about $10 a year, so you can buy more than one domain that will point to your website. It is common to have the initial form of a long name (www.bfg.ca) registered as well as the full name (www.burnabyflowersandgifts.ca) and just have both domains pointing at your website.

5) Content, content, content… content is king – Just like you continually bring in new products, have sales and specials, and do things to ensure repeat business, your website needs to continually have fresh content IF you care about having people returning to it regularly. Now, Gravytrain highly recommends having some sort of new article or information posted to your website on at least a weekly basis. We offer this service to our clients so they don’t have to worry about generating the content themselves. For example, our Burnaby Florist might decide that he would like to write a weekly weblog about flowers, only to decide that three weeks in he’s too busy to bother. We handle writing this content which will continue to draw users back to the site to see what’s new, get new tips, and then of course your business’ brand is refreshed in their minds.

It’s a journey to take your business online, but Gravytrain is here to help guide you along the path. Click here for our contact information and give us a call or email for a free consultation. Let us know what your aspirations are, and we’ll help you reach them.

Because every business and its customer base are unique, we here at Gravytrain believe in tailoring your online marketing and customer relationship solution to fit the needs of your business. Our goal is simple: we’re here to assist you with expanding your client base while enhancing the relationship between your business and your current clientele.

Here are some of the services that Gravytrain will customize to fit the specifics of your marketing plan – click on each one for further details on how it can impact your business:

No matter what your specific challenges and needs are, Gravytrain will build the solution that will allow you to focus on acquiring new business while enhancing your relationships with your expanding customer base.