So you wanna have a website? You have spent a lot of time browsing the Internet and think that having a website is really cool. It could lead you to fame, expand your reach globally, attact more customers, get more bucks into your pocket, and so on. You have seen your competition really made it big on the Web and you really believe with certainty that you can beat that bastard. Afterall, you have an MBA in the country’s most prestigious Business School, while he has not even finished his Accounting Degree.

The problem is you don’t know where to begin. Should you enroll in a vocational school and learn a bit of HTML yourself? Or, maybe you just want to hire that next-door guy with a long hair who is an expert in the latest version of Corel Draw. You think he is so fast he could get your website up and running in five minutes!

In this article, I’ll try address the most basic issues that you need to understand before you even start building your website. Knowing about these things could save you money and some needless mistakes that other business website owners experienced in their rush of having their own websites.

FOUR BASIC QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What kind of website do you want?

Websites can be categories into two — personal and business. A Personal Website is a where you place your family pictures, show your pets to your friends, write your poems, etc. You should try to avoid this thing unless you want to be a celebrity or run for public office. A Business Website where you sell your stuff, promote your company, or show you contact details with an intention of helping a site visitor get what he wants and maybe earn money as a result.

Knowing what kind of website you want to create could help you in deciding whether
you only need a simple Friendster Account or one with a commercial touch.

2. Who is your target audience?

There is where some of the business websites really fail. If you can’t identify who your prospective visitors are, how will you be able to promote your website to them? Better spend a lot of time thinking about this.

3. What do you want to put on your website?

After you have identified who your visitors are, determine exactly what they will be looking for and give it to them. This is important to keep them visiting your website. You don’t want people to visit your website just once and them forget about it.

4. Do you have time to keep your website updated?

If the answer to that is “No”, don’t even try to create a website. Serious website owners always allocate time to update their website with fresh information. Some new products will be added, others will be removed from the inventory. Your competition has lowered its price, should you keep your price just the same? Have you attended a workshop in your field of profession and you think your visitors can benefit from it too? Then, say something about it in your blog.

It’s important to keep the customers visiting your site, unless you don’t want to do business with them.

IN SUMMARY

We have not even discussed about technical jargons. That should be subject for the next article on this category. You can try to ignore these things if all you really want to do is just have a website and keep hoping that visitors will come back out of empathy. Maybe your friends will, but the customers certainly will not.