Why would my business need a website?

Because your competitors already do.

The Web presents a variety of ways to increase revenue:

	Enhance brand awareness. Because of its multimedia capability, the Web can help you increase brand awareness through richer, more engaging brand identity.
	Enhance product awareness. Increase the awareness of your product to a specific target audience.
	Boost lead generation. Take advantage of the interactive nature of the Web to capture leads.
	Speed lead response. Because you get leads immediately, you can respond faster, while the customer is still "hot."
	Reach new customers. Because of its worldwide reach, the Web helps you reach customers who may not be available through other media.
	Add a new sales channel. Add online sales that are incremental to those of your traditional off-line channels such as retail and direct mail.
	Increase sales through existing channels. In addition to providing a new sales channel, the Web can also boost sales through your existing channels by increasing product and brand awareness.
	Improved customer service and support. The Web presents opportunities to increase revenue indirectly through enhanced customer service and support.

Opportunities to Decrease Costs:

You can use both Internet and intranet Web sites to reduce costs and improve productivity in external and internal business processes:

	Reduce support costs. It is often cheaper, easier, and more effective to support customers over the Internet than through more traditional methods such as telephone support. In addition, corporations can support employees and business partners over their corporate intranets, keeping them informed and soliciting their feedback.
	Reduce sales costs. Sales over the Internet typically require less overhead and less sales support than traditional sales channels. A Web site can reduce dependence on more expensive sales channels, including retail.
	Reduce inventory costs. A Web site can help you reduce inventory costs by shortening sales cycles. In addition, the Web can help you reduce inventory costs by shortening supply cycles from your vendors.
	Reduce materials costs. Save paper production, printing, and distribution costs by disseminating information electronically over the Internet or intranet. For example, you can publish annual reports, distribute marketing materials, and present customer support tips on your Internet Web site. An intranet Web site can lower the cost of delivering internal manuals and forms.

Establishing a Web site for yourself can be one of the most important business moves you make. Because of the enormous potential and significant investment involved, it is essential that you make this move carefully, and it is essential to grasp what all is involved.

Web sites, with their nearly universal reach and highly interactive nature, present opportunities that are not available through other means. Through Web sites, organizations can increase revenues, decrease costs and build tighter relationships with their customers, employees, and business partners. There are almost 1 billion sites on the Internet.

But Web sites can require substantial investments to create and maintain. In the international arena, web site spending by companies ranges from $300 for small companies to more than $1 million for large companies. Whether you are considering a Web site for the Internet or your Intranet, it's important that you plan and implement it carefully. Only in this way will you realize the full potential of your site and gain a handsome return on your investment.

Planning and building a Web site requires expertise in a wide variety of new areas, including Web technologies, the unique aspects of the Web as a medium and the cyber world resources available, such as Web search engines and Web advertising, to help you generate traffic to your site. To get on the Web quickly, without sacrificing the effectiveness or quality of your Web site, you may want to seek assistance from outside organizations that specialize in Web planning, deployment, and refinement. And here is where entities like Lighthouse Technologies pitches in.

Web technology makes possible exciting new business models for marketing, communications, commerce, publishing, advertising, client/server applications, telephony, business-process optimization, entertainment, and eventually broadcasting. With a Web site, an organization can reach a worldwide audience of literally millions of people, quickly and effectively. Because the Web is interactive, it can custom-tailor the information it delivers to each person for maximum impact. That's why organizations and individuals are implementing Web sites at an astonishing rate.

A BUSINESS-ORIENTED APPROACH TO EFFECTIVE WEB SITES

Because of the attractive potential of Web technology - such as its worldwide reach and ability to interact with users, and the apparent ease of building sites, many organizations are rushing headlong to establish Internet and intranet Web sites. But many are taking a haphazard approach, resulting in wasted money and, more significantly, lost opportunity. Forrester Research found that one of the most common mistakes companies make when implementing Web sites is not having a clear vision or purpose for the sites.

The following sections present a business-oriented approach to planning, deploying, and refining your Web site. By addressing the factors identified in this process, you can take full advantage of the power of Web sites to maintain a competitive edge. There are six fundamental steps in the process:

1. Understand the medium

	Reach new audiences
	Sell products and services
	Generate brand awareness
	Increase customer satisfaction
	Disseminate information
	Receive feedback
	Automate business processes

2. Plan your Web site

	Plan your site within the context of your overall business strategy
	Define your goals
	Identify opportunities to increase revenue
	Identify opportunities to decrease costs
	Define your target audience
	Establish and monitor objectives

3. Deploy your Web site

	Design according to your end requirement, and according to your target market
	Use tools that contribute to your business objective
	Design your site from a usability perspective and not merely from an aesthetic perspective
	Build in the means to monitor and continually evaluate your Web site
	Solicit visitor information

4. Market your Web site

Leverage Existing Marketing resources: put your URL on

	Press releases
	Company Newsletters
	Flyers and Posters
	Stationary
	Advertisements
	On-hold Messages
	Business Cards
	Brochures
	Product Packages
	Promotional Packages, etc.

List with Online Information and Directory Resources

	Search Engines
	Directories
	Announcement Sites
	Award Sites and "Cool Site Guides"
	Banner Advertising
	Putting Advertisements in Electronic Publications
	Organizing online events such as chats, surveys and contests
	Visiting public domain message boards
	Using Automatic tools (not preferred!)

5. Analyze the results Number of site visits and specific page visits per day

	The size of the audience you are reaching
	Pages that are most popular
	Pages that are least popular
	Visitor paths through the site
	How users typically travel through your site
	Online questionnaires and feedback
	Visits derived from ad banners
	Which banners and ads producing good or poor click-through
	Which click-throughs are metamorphosing into revenue generating business

6. Refine and maintain your Web site Leverage interaction to improve your site

	Establish an iterative process to keep your Web site optimized
	Experiment and monitor the results
	Make changes and watch their effect
	Review site marketing strategies
	Reconcile your Web site strategy in the context of your overall business strategy
	Stay in tune with technology

CONCLUSION

A Web site can revolutionize the way you do business. It can help you increase revenues, decrease costs, and build tighter relationships with customers, employees, and business partners. As you gain experience with your Web site, you can continue to integrate it with your business, taking advantage of its unparalleled reach and high level of interaction to increase your competitive edge.

Establishing and maintaining a Web site can represent a significant investment. To realize maximum return on that investment, you'll need to plan your site carefully, design it to take full advantage of the Web's unique capabilities, market it effectively and refine it continually. This requires expertise in a variety of areas, many of which are new to your organization.

Fortunately, Lighthouse Technologies can provide you all the above-mentioned services at a very reasonable cost. We have an eager team of developers and designers who have worked on a broad spectrum of platforms.

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