Planning, Developing, and Promoting Successful Small Business Websites

Table of Contents

The other major expense involved in running a successful website is the labor to create and maintain the website. Capable programmers, developers, and designers are not normally cheap laborers. Managing the payroll for a website project will be a major portion of the budgetary planning of a website. Some companies will need to have a website developer or staff of developers in-house, while other companies may be able to contract the work out to another agency for better value. Quality developers can be hard to find, and many large fortune 500 companies even choose to use contracted labor through large interactive advertising agencies. Additional payroll expenses such as merchant accounts, payment gateways, and security certificates related to the website will also be generated in e-commerce websites. For any e-commerce site there must be a budget and plan for order fulfillment to ensure customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Most sites take an extended period of time to succeed. It can take a site three to six months from site launch to get listed completely in the search engines, and sometimes more for the entire site to be indexed and register all of the hyper-links from other sites. During this time, many sites turn into a black hole of expenses that can bankrupt a non-savvy small businessperson that has not planned accordingly. Between development costs and hosting costs the monthly expenses pile up quick!

It is during the initial budgeting phase when many of the “cool” elements of a site should be put on hold until a later time. Shockwave elements in a site add a lot of visual credibility to a site and increase the “wow” factor but are not always necessary when budgets are thin. They can be very expensive to create, but can be put off until deemed more necessary.

The test of necessity should also play a large role in determining how much time will be spent on achieving compatibility for older web browsers. Web-browsers are just starting to adhere to standards due to the relatively new nature of the Internet. Websites may not work in all browsers because, “the first four to five generations of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer did not merely tolerate non-standard markup and browser-specific code; they actually encouraged sloppy authoring and proprietary scripting in an ill-conceived battle to own the browser space.” (Zeldman, 2001, digital-web.com) Many times developing sites to maintain their appearance in all browsers can be a costly (if even possible) endeavor. Planning a reasonable level of backward browser compatibility is necessary to keep end-users happy while not using up excessive amounts of a limited budget on a very small portion of visitors. The most important thing for browser compatibility is only that information is accessible in older browsers, and not necessarily that it is lavishly formatted.

Appendices
(All in a single document) Appendix 1-1: Overture Search Term
Research Tool

Appendix 1-2: Wordtracker Search Query Research Tool

Appendix 1-3: Google Sets Website Theme Research Tool

Appendix 1-4: Reach/ Acquire/ Convert/ Retain

Chart Appendix 2-5: Zehnder’s of Frankenmuth Information Architecture Flowchart

Appendix 2-6: Search Engine Themes Pyramid Information Architecture Example

Appendix 2-7: Webpage Download Time by File Size Chart

Appendix 2-8: Expected Locations for Common E-commerce Elements

Appendix 2-9: Website Usability Checklist

Appendix 2-10: Text Vs.Code Ratio/ Content Near the Top of Souce Code Examples

Appendix 3-11: Overture Bid Price Tool

Appendix 3-12: Webalizer Website Visitor Tracking Tool

Appendix 3-13: AW STATS Website Visitor Tracking Tool Appendix

3-14: Clicktracks Website Statistics
Analysis Tool

References
Author Notes

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Planning, Developing, and Promoting Successful Small Business Websites Table of Contents

Planning, Developing, and Promoting a Successful Small Business Website

Website Budgetary Planning Page 18

Website Labor Expense Planning

Planning, Developing, and Promoting Successful Small Business Websites

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