SWI Blog

Need a Website ?

What are the benefits of a website?
What do you need for a website?
What is “E-commerce”?
How does SWI design my site?
What costs will be involved with establishing a website?
What are a website’s advantages?
How to Beign?

1.) What are the benefits of a website?
Simple. We’ll call it the four M’s: Money. Media. Marketability. Masses. You’re in business to make Money - and to make it, you can’t waste it. A website is the world’s most effective use of Money to purchase Media to Market to the Masses. The Internet is a very affordable Media and it functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no labor costs to watch it. The Internet has the most inexpensive and widespread marketing capabilities ever seen - period! And a website offers your services to the Masses. Statistics show that the Internet is an excellent way to market your business and sell your products and services. More and more customers are logging on and making purchases, buying services and researching choices and information through the Internet. Why should you limit your business to your immediate locale when the whole world is a keystroke away? You also gain major credibility by having an Internet presence; effectively, you can look like one of the big companies - all without wasting your money.

2.) What do you need for a website?
A Computer: Although highly recommended, it is not necessary for you to have a computer but it is necessary for those wishing to view your site. ISP: an Internet Service Provider is how you connect to the Internet. This ISP will provide you with an email address to communicate by electronic mail (email). Domain Name: This is www.yourname.com; your address or home page on the Internet. Host: An Internet presence provider. This is where your website is stored for the world to view. Website Design: You’ll need all the codes, computer language, scripts and graphics which, when put together, formulate your website into a viewable form for the world to see. FTP: File Transfer Protocol to transfer information to and from your website for updates, repair, edits and changes. This is how web designers communicate with your domain at the host. Maintenance: Updates, additions, changes, and most importantly, search engine analysis and submission of the pages that make up your website.

3.) What is “e-commerce”?
E-commerce is the buzzword for the new millennium, and for very good reason. The Internet is changing the way business is done with literally billions of dollars being made over the Internet. E-commerce simply means Electronic Commerce. E-commerce gives you the ability to accept payment over the Internet, by either credit card or electronic checks. Through E-commerce, you can sell products or services instantly to anyone in the world without having to constantly monitor your website.

4.) How does SWI design my site?
There are many steps involved in designing and creating a fully functional website. First, we determine the exact goals of the client’s website. If, for instance, you are selling a tangible product then the goal would be a site that has your product listings, pictures, descriptions, prices and shipping information in an on-line catalog. The end goal being a website enabling the consumer to easily view, gather information about and then purchase these products on-line (e-commerce). In addition to these basic goals, there is the more far reaching and highly important goal of determining how this site will fit in with your marketing strategy. All these facts are formulated in a design layout that describes the fundamental business strategy behind the client’s website. In essence, we want to ensure that we, as the website design team, fully understand what is required to satisfy our client’s ultimate Internet and marketing goals. Secondly, our design team works with the client to create a basic visual layout of how the site will appear on the screen. This can be as simple as being drawn out by the client on a plain piece of paper, using a word processor or even by showing us another website that looks like what you want your site to look like. In this step, we might make suggestions about adding any additional functions that are absolutely necessary or that might be useful. This step is our outline for the actual website. The third step is to map the flow of the site from the consumers’ point of view in order to ensure that potential customers can easily navigate from the entry point through to the main content pages (and all other pages within the site). This is done by providing intuitive and thorough navigational tools. In this last step, we combine all the above information (marketing strategies, e-commerce, and visual layout) and come up with the final and complete website design plan. Our design team registers the client’s domain name, activates the client’s host account, codes the pages and implements any other functions necessary to make the client’s website functional. We fully test all components of the site. Then we submit the site in beta (or test) format for the client to view and approve. If any additions or adaptations are necessary, they are made at this point. The site is re-tested and then re-submitted for the client’s final approval. Next, the site is uploaded to our server with a final test of all the site’s functions. Finally, when we are sure the test is in perfect order and the client is satisfied, the site is submitted to search engines and/or directories and the client is instructed to implement any additional marketing strategies. Viola´! Your website is ready for the world to see!

5.) What costs will be involved with establishing a website?
There are three cost elements involved with developing a website and putting it on the Internet.
1. Website Development, Design and Start-Up Costs: This refers to paying a website design firm to create the site and place the site in search engine registrations worldwide. Costs also include buying a domain name and a small fee for your host server configuration. Included in this fee, at no cost, is advice or help in marketing your website. Your website’s final costs vary and are proportional to site size and capabilities.
Contact SWI for a free price quote. (We recommend never building a website without a fixed cost quote in hand.)
2. Domain Hosting: Very affordable monthly fee 3. Periodic Editing, Update and Edits/Additions: Proportional to amount of monthly work required.

6.) What are a website’s advantages?
This is a big question with a multitude of answers. Development and distribution costs are extremely low. When you compare the cost of establishing a website to what it costs to promote your business in print or on the air, you’ll see that a website is the cheapest form of marketing ever created. A radio campaign featuring several 30-second spots per week for three months could run you $5,000 - $10,000. That gets you five minutes per week of exposure for three months in the local area only. Newspaper and magazine ads are similarly highly priced, and they only last for the life span of that particular publication. A website has virtually limitless space. You could put up a website with dozens of photographs and several thousand words for under $1,000 for the first year, and keep it up and running for a few hundred dollars per year after that. What would it cost to run a newspaper ad of this size for a year? Imagine how much it would cost to produce a catalog for 200 different products, and keep it in consumers’ hands for an entire year. You can accomplish this with a website very easily, with low development cost and almost no distribution cost. Websites are in full color - a palette of 16.7 million colors for your photographs alone. A website is accessible globally; that means your website can be viewed by anyone, anywhere, as long as they have Internet access. There are no physical limitations to broadcast areas as in radio, no circulation region restrictions as in newspapers or magazines. You can keep your website more current more affordably than any other media; you can update a website immediately, and as often as you like. Imagine you sell products whose prices fluctuate. With a website, you can change these prices every time they go up or down, so your marketing materials are always accurate. In addition, with a website the little guys can compete with the big guys since a website is economical and not limited by size. This means a small business can present as large or creative an image on the Internet as a bigger company - with the right design team. A website also allows easy, safe communication between the consumer and you so that anyone who visits your site can contact you at any time by sending an email. Unlike communications that originate from other forms of advertising, consumers who send emails don’t have to deal with many problems of everyday business: pushy salesmen, remembering to call during business hours, having to battle crowds to get to your stores, spending time waiting on voice mail or getting the wrong information. It’s convenient, easy, and safe for the consumer. Email is also convenient for you. You can respond to all your customer inquiries at the same time, and do it when you have a free moment - not in the middle of rush hour when someone calls up to ask for product information or directions to your location. You can save money on tech support and answering questions. If your employees spend a lot of time answering the same questions and sending out the same material, you can reduce that labor cost significantly by providing the information on the website. For instance, a client can avoid having to mail or fax information for over 1,000 phone call solicitations in a one-year period simply by providing the information on their site. That improves on labor costs and provides a real cost savings in reduced long distance phone bills (for faxes) and postage. Your website can also take orders while you sleep as people can place orders on a website at any time, day or night. But most importantly, no salesmen manning the store, no utilities, no insurance, no payroll…computers don’t need a benefit package or overtime. For every second of every day, your website is working for you! As to your choice for website design, if a designer can’t tell you why a website is a unique marketing tool as we have here, how successful will their website be? Are they helping you to develop a marketing mechanism or are they selling special effects? Is it an intelligent tool for driving business or an overpriced, turbo-charged business card? Make sure you choose a designer with marketing expertise, experience and skills - Creative Design Group!

7.) How to begin?
There are key steps to consider before building a first class website, steps that actually preceed working with a web designer. The steps aren’t difficult but are important in the process of putting a site together. SWI can help you with this process.

First, we must decide why your business needs a website and the audience it will target. With the number of internet users at over 700,000,000 strong and growing, can you afford not to have a website? Determine what topics or information your website should contain. This could be product information, contact information, a searchable database, special pricing or pages of photographs. What will appeal to your target audience? Set the goals of your website. Do you wish to sell products online or offer customer support? Take a look at what resources you and/or your staff can devote to your website. You may want to assign a webmaster to oversee the project. This should be someone within your company who can work to gather information and ideas, not only at the beginning of the project but on an ongoing basis. They need not know the internet but must know your business. Domain Name Registration - We will research your domain name request and, if available, register that name. You’ll want your domain name to represent your business and be easy to remember. Which name would be best:yourbusiness.com, business.com or yourname.com? Your choice may also depend on which name is available. Once you have completed this process you will have a clear and feasible plan for your website. Following your free consultation with Team Simple , you will be well on your way to making your presence known on the World Wide Web. The experience of developing a website is painless, even if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the Internet! We’ll take your information and goals and come back with our design suggestions. We’ll work with you as a team. Let’s get started! , appointment or for any additional information you might need.

Add commentApril 26th, 2008

Business Value of Good Design

Sandy
Web Consultant and Project Manager, SWI
Creating a Website is like creating a Dream home, both require careful planning

Tom Peters
Corporate management guru
In a world loaded with stuff that looks like all the other stuff and performs like all the other stuff, design is a way to stand out.

Rodney Fitch
Design Advisory Board, BAA
Only one company can be the cheapest, the others have to use design.

George Fisher
CEO, Kodak
In the end, what customers really see is what designers design. That is the ultimate tool that a company has in order to be competitive in the marketplace.

Sir John Egan
CEO, BAA
Design helps to shape experience, and the quality of experience that people have of any company is the most influencing factor in shaping their attitude toward it. It affects loyalty, repeat purchase and the way people talk about the company to colleagues and friends.

Jerri Menaul
Boston Business Journal
The objective of design is to communicate a message in such a way that it produces an intended result.

Paul Rand
Grand Old Man of graphic design
That’s what design is all about; taking the essence of something and enhancing its message by putting it into a form everyone can identify with.

Samina Quraeshi
Design Director,
National Endowment for the Arts
As America nears the third millennium, the nation and the world face unprecedented change. Frequently compared to the Industrial Revolution, the transformation we are experiencing today is a source of profound threats as well as daunting opportunities. To succeed in this environment, we must anticipate, shape, and respond with innovative products, communications, services, facilities and environments. Design is the key to helping us meet this challenge.

Edward Tufte
Information designer
Good design is clear thinking made manifest.

Add commentMarch 20th, 2008

The Six Senses of Killer Viral Marketing

The term “viral marketing” is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. “Do they have a vaccine for that yet?” you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don’t even have to mate — he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined
What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,Who see the message, Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

• Gives away products or services
• Provides for effortless transfer to others
• Scales easily from small to very large
• Exploits common motivations and behaviors
• Utilizes existing communication networks
• Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services
“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca“). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large
To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks
Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources
The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Add commentMarch 20th, 2008