12 Benefits of having a Website

Some of the goals that can be achieved by launching a website include the following:

1. Far Cheaper and Much More Flexible Than Print Advertising
The Internet is extremely different from print advertising in that space is cheap, your advertisement is accessible for a longer period of time, the content can be changed without having to ask someone to do it for you (if you use a content management system) and you can potentially reach a wider audience.

This is not to say that you should not use other forms of advertising at all. You can use it to entice people to visit your website and find out about your company and potentially open two-way communication between the potential customer and a sales person.

2. Market Expansion
The Internet has allowed businesses to break through the geographical barriers and become accessible, virtually, from any country in the world by a potential customer that has Internet access.

3. Diversify Revenue Streams
A website is not just a medium for representation of your company, it is a form of media from which everybody can acquire information. You can use this media to sell advertising space to other businesses.

A recent trend has risen where businesses feature their very own directory of complimentary services, where the visitor can search for information on a business that will enhance the use of your service. The business sells complimentary businesses a listing in their directory.

A good example is a catering company featuring a directory with businesses such as event co-coordinators, electronic equipment rental companies, etc.

4. 24 7 365
No more turning customers away when its time to close shop, putting up a note saying closed for public holiday , or leaving an irritating message on your answering service specifying your trading hours tell them to visit your website for information they are looking for.

5. Offer Convenience
It is far more convenient for a person to research a product on the Internet than it is to get in a car, drive somewhere and look for or ask someone for information on a product. Also, a potential customer won t have to judge a call centre agent to determine whether he/she has their best interests in mind, or just wants to make a sale.

The potential customer can visit your website whenever they like in their own privacy and comfort, without the stresses and distractions that exist in the real world .
Your website is a self-service medium for example, instead of having to wait in a long cue to pay your TV License, you can now do it electronically through the TV License website.

6. Add Value and Satisfaction
By offering convenience, a point of reference and that touch of individualized customer service, you ultimately add value to your offering and your customers experience a higher level of satisfaction.

Your website can add value in other ways too, by featuring tips, advice and general interest content you can entertain your customers. This will also help them remember you better.

7. Standardize Sales Performance
By looking at which approached / pitches have worked in the past and those which have not, you can produce the ultimate pitch and use it with your website, so that you use it on every customer. No more training of sales people and waiting for them to get a feel for your line of trade.

8. Improve credibility
A website gives you the opportunity to tell potential customers what you are about and why you deserve their trust and confidence. In fact, many people use the internet for pre-purchase research so that they can determine for themselves whether a particular supplier or brand is worthy of their patronage, and won t take them for a ride.
The Internet also allows for Viral Marketing where your website visitors spread positive word-of-mouth about your business – your customers do your marketing!

9. Promote your Brick n Mortar Presence
Getting lost trying to find a place can be frustrating for a potential customer. You can publish what they call a dummy map on your website, which shows directions and landmarks graphically, and the potential customer can print it out when looking for your Brick n Mortar premises.

You might advertise a promotion on your website encouraging the visitor to visit your Brick n Mortar premises (e.g.. At a branch near you! ).
Also, if you recently moved to a new location, you will have to wait for the next ‘phone directory to come out before people figure out where you currently are. Because a website is flexible you can change the content as you like you can change you contact details instantly and lower the risk of losing customers when moving to a new location.

10. Growth Opportunity
A website serves as a great place to refer potential investors to, to show them what your company is about, what it has achieved and what it can achieve in future.

11. Two-Way Communicative Marketing
Customers can quickly and easily give feedback on your product and/or marketing approach.

12. Cheap Market Research
You can use features on your website such as visitor polls, online surveys and your website statistics to find out what your customers like more and how they feel about certain aspects of your business to determine how you can improve your product and the way you do business.

Fore more information visit us at www.mediaspawn.com

MEDIASPAWN TORONTO WEBSITE DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT – Mediaspawn is a Toronto based website design studio, specializing in custom website development, Internet Marketing, and Content Management Solutions.
What makes our internet web design company unique is an absolute belief in professional website development solutions that are comprehensive, wide-ranging and cutting edge. More…HYPERLINK “website_development1.php”

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE SITE
BOOST SALES, IMPROVE YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE
EXPAND CUSTOMER BASE AND TARGET AUDIENCE,
using our proven natural search engine optimization solutions.
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CONTENT MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS - Mediaspawn’s web based Content Management System (CMS), allows anyone to manage, and publish a dynamic website without any programming knowledge or technical skills.
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10 Reasons why you may require a Content Mangement System

You need a Web Content Management Systems (CMS) if:

1. You manage news and content updates with Adobe PDF. Overuse of PDF content is often the tell-tale sign an organization needs a CMS. Business users turn to PDF to produce new content because the process of updating web pages is too difficult. Organizations at the top-end of this spectrum publish all press releases with PDF, or worse yet – the cardinal sin of web content – Microsoft Word. A similar sign is content managed as images on a website. If you are putting text updates as images or blending text and images it is time for a CMS.

2. You need to manually update multiple pages on your website when you add content. When you publish news stories or events do you need to manually update the home page, section front, related content links, audience content links or other sections of your website? Many content management systems provide a “Write Once Publish Everywhere” approach to managing content that automatically updates pages and navigation or provides streamlined updates. The ability to automate updates is also called content reuse and when combined with XML content is often considered the #1 ROI factor for web content management.

3. You support multiple audiences. For example at a university current students, faculty, prospective students; Or in government – community, business, and employees. We call this multi-constituent content management. A good CMS can help you repurpose and channel your content for different audiences – saving time, money, and simplifying the web management process.

4. You manage over 70 pages of content. Many people consider 70-pages a small website. Comparatively it is – many Mediaspawn customers manage tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. But 70 pages is the tipping point where content becomes unmanageable without a CMS and simple web tools like Dreamweaver, or Front-Page, have a hard time scaling to support information architecture and content reuse requirements.

5. A good CMS does not only help you create web pages, but also update and manage pages. If old content is not updated or archived you need a CMS. More importantly you need an internal process to manage content – remember that ultimately people not software manage the web.

6. It takes more than two days to get new content on the web. Two days is an eternity on the web. But assuming you are using a CMS with multi-step workflow I would argue that two days is an acceptable process-time with approvals. However, time and time again I have spoken with content managers who experience several weeks to get basic updates up on a website. This can be a “Webmaster Bottleneck” issue or it can be too complex of a process using third-party vendors or design firms. Either way, if you cannot get emergency content online in minutes and approved content online in days you need a CMS.

7. You work in a regulated industry. Compliance is one of the key drivers for using web content management. A good CMS product will allow you to enforce standards across an organization (although I would argue that ultimately compliance is not a CMS feature, but a business process).

8. You manage more than three websites. Many organizations need to manage dozens if not hundreds of websites. Prime examples are affiliate chapters for trade associations or unions, franchises or branch locations for businesses, or country sites and multi-tiered marketing for large enterprises. If you fall into any of these categories you need a robust content management system that will support multi-site management, content reuse, and workflow. The rub is that although you need a robust CMS, you also need one that is simple to use because invariably local site managers require easier CMS solutions.

9. You manage multi-lingual content. Similar to multi-site content management, multi-lingual content requires a robust CMS application. There are several multi-lingual use cases (same site bi-lingual, same site multi-lingual or distributed country sites bi-lingual). There are also different processes from centrally translated content to locally translated content to outsourced localization services. With a web content management system some of the key features to evaluate are separation of content from presentation, content reuse, support for Unicode and BIDI (bi-directional text), dynamic templates (co-branding and navigation) and the ability to localize Flash and other media in the CMS.

10. Your branding is inconsistent across departmental sections and sites. Often in a large organization like a university or a regionally departmentalized corporation there is a lot of autonomy in website operations. I would argue that a certain amount of autonomy is good, but not to detriment of branding and messaging. If each section of your website looks like an entirely different website you need a web content management system. A good CMS will provide templates and stylesheets to enforce branding, while still providing each department the ability to create original content. A very good CMS will support variations in templates (co-brands) while still applying style control.
There are many other reasons to purchase a web content management system. At Mediaspawn we often work with organizations trying to launch online marketing programs that require frequent updates for landing pages and other content, or developing complex content applications, or needing to support more advanced information architecture like faceted navigations. But really any website that is managed by a team or in an organization will benefit from content management.

For information on the Content Management Solutions Mediaspawn offers, click here

The importance of Link Building

Link Building is the benchmark of being successful on the web. Well, almost everything these days staring from your favorite food, book, movie and clothes among others has a web presence or in other words an online presence. Just having a web presence is not sufficient, but you must be very popular for customers to know about what you are offering to them. So for this you need to build links of your site on the web. Link building services provided by companies are the different strategies which are used for increasing the links of a site on the World Wide Web. Link building has been found to be one of the very successful strategies undertaken for search engine optimization.

Search engines put a major emphasis on the links which are present on the site, to assign them rankings on search engine results. Building up links on the web is not an easy task and one needs to hire professional link building services, if you want to get the best results for your business. Each website is made differently and that is why the potential of inbound link is also bound to be different. The baseline is that the site must get good inbound links and just any other link will not work. The link building service that you will hire for your business must be effective enough to give you the best results.

Links are the important elements that helps search engine in determining the level of popularity of any site on the web. In simple words, if you have more links to your site from other site your site will be ranked highly by all the major search engines. There are some things that you must consider while exchanging links with any other site. Make sure that the site is complete, no one wants to exchange links with a site that is not complete. In fact, link building services will not be successful if you do not follow the guidelines properly. The amount of content must also be good, since search engine put a lot of emphasis on the content available on a site for ranking purposes.

A simple way for you to go about doing link building services is to type the keywords on which you want to promote your site and see the results that come up. You can browse the sites that come up in the result and see if the site provides any facility for link exchange with other sites. Well, even if you find that the site does not provide the link exchange facility, you can write to the webmaster directly and request for a link exchange program with you. Another thing you must take care for your link exchange under link building services is to exchange links only with that site, which has a higher page rank then yours.

Link Building Services can be obtained from several companies, but you need to be a little cautious about this. Simply make sure that you hire the link buildings services form those firms which have a very good track record. In other word, hire link building services from the best firms who have the most efficient staff working for them.

Visit www.linksite.ca to begin your link building today!

The Importance of Having a Website

As the Internet gets older and more flooded with sites, it is more important than ever to have a professional-looking web site if you want customers to take your business seriously.

This should be common sense by now, yet it is appalling at how many wretched designs for business sites exist out there.

eCommerce sites

If you have not focused on having a professional looking site while running an eCommerce store, you should be ashamed of yourself. When your entire business exists online, you cannot afford to turn off potential customers by presenting a tacky, poorly designed site.

For one thing, it can automatically extinguish any credibility you hope to build in a matter of seconds. How can you expect a customer to trust you enough to purchase something from you if they think that you don’t even take yourself seriously enough to have a decent looking site.

Now aesthetics are obviously left to opinion, but it is pretty easy to tell if effort was put into any given design.

Sites for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Perhaps you don’t see this of as much as an issue if you don’t run an online business, but for any brick and mortar store, your website is one of your most important advertisements. And guess what…the credibility factor comes right back into play.

Maybe your customers aren’t buying from you online, but that doesn’t mean they won’t look you up. If your site doesn’t convey the element of professionalism, they just might go to your competitors who do take the time to provide a professional-looking site.

Other factors to consider

Things like typos can also deteriorate your reputation as a credible business. Customers will think that if you don’t even care enough to fix errors like this, why would you care about them? Typos happen. God knows I’m just as guilty as anyone, but try to maintain some kind of quality control. It gets especially bad when they are excessive. Read over your text.

Cheesy animated gifs, popup ads and music that starts when the site is loaded are huge turn-offs for visitors. Keep these things in mind when building your site. Minimizing customer annoyance is crucial to keeping them around.

Who’s going to design it?

Perhaps you’re not too experienced in web design. Who can blame you? You’ve probably had enough on your plate. If you don’t have a designer on staff (which I would recommend), there are more freelance designers out there than ever before.

Can you afford to hire a freelance designer? They’re not always cheap, but my guess is if you look hard enough, you will find one that is willing to work within your budget, partially because there are more than ever before, and just like you, they are looking for business too.

Other options

Of course there are templates and themes available all over the Internet for purchase, but they often lack the personal touch of using a real designer. And by purchasing these things, chances are that there are a bunch of other sites that bought them too and look exactly the same, and that is not the best way to make your business stand out from the crowd.

Make Design a Priority

To wrap this up, just make having a professional-looking web site a top priority for your business. Your customers will appreciate it and so will you when they start taking you seriously and buying from you.