Express Business Systems Fast Track Your Online Business
The following questions will help you determine the technical requirements for your website. Once your requirements are identified you can then go about finding the right software to do it yourself, or the right designer with the necessary skills to develop it for you.
What is the purpose of your website?
It is important to understand the key purpose of your website, in some cases, a number of the points below will be relevant. Do you:
- Want to sell products?
- Take online bookings?
- Generate leads and inquiries?
- Provide information to help save staff time answering common questions/queries?
- Build a customer community?
- Run competitions and promotions?
What are the technical requirements of your site?
- What hosting plan will you require – shared or dedicated?
- Will you require the capability to regularly update the content yourself?
- Will you want a ‘contact us form’ for visitors to type queries or questions?
- Will you require any customer interaction? e. will your customers upload photos.
- Will you have a public discussion board where your customers can discuss their mutual areas of interest surrounding your products or services?
- Will you want to run special offers?
- Will you want to publish regular articles or information updates?
- Will you collect information from online forms or surveys?
- Will you need to promote your events, videos, music, or photos?
- Will you want your customers to be able to review your products or services?
- Will your staff or other key stakeholders require administration access – do you need to limit the access to key areas of your website’s admin side?
- Will you need a language translation?
- Will you want an online gallery?
- Do you want to integrate your site content and updates with your Facebook Business profile?
- Do you want to integrate Like/Follow buttons on your site for your social media business pages?
- Will you want to integrate a Newsletter Sign up on your website?
- Will you want a support chat for your customers to receive live support when you are online?
- Will your customers require secure access to purchase or download your products?
E-commerce site requirements?
- Will your customers have accounts on your site where they log in to retrieve details, check orders, etc.?
- Will you want trade pricing, loyalty schemes, and discounts for your customers?
- Will you need to upload products in bulk?
- Will you want pre-calculated postage based on delivery location or weight of orders?
- What payment methods will you accept and want to be integrated?
- Will you want to highlight new products or products on sale?
- Will you want to target customers by their buying preferences with online marketing campaigns?
- Will you want your online store to integrate with your bricks and mortar store stock control?
- Will you need currency conversion?
What about content?
Once you have figured out your technical requirements, ensuring you have good relevant content is the other critical point in your online strategy.
Ensure you develop clear messages about who you are and what you do, that are consistent with your current brand. Be clear in your messages on how you can meet your customers’ needs and have a very clear ‘call to action’ so they can easily take the next step. If your goal is to have them call you – be sure the “Contact us” links or the contact information is clear and in a prominent position on your website. Don’t bury your key ‘call to action’ in text or on a page deep inside your site. Make it easy for them to take the next step and be sure to consider the number of clicks it takes someone to get to their desired outcome.
Another key reason to ensure you have a clear message and good content is for search engines. You’re ranking and visibility in search engines rely heavily on the quality of your content and its relevance to your business and the services or products you provide. It’s that simple.
When writing your content, consider your potential customers and build your message around your research on what they are looking for and what their needs are. Try not to fill your content and key messages with what ‘we’ do or who ‘we’ are. Talk to them from their point of view – i.e. focus on them and use the word “you” while explaining the benefits they will receive rather than from the ‘I’ or ‘we’ position – try to work from the other viewpoint.
Don’t just copy your printed brochures – your website allows you to be more conversational and friendly when delivering your messages and avoid jargon.
Building it yourself or getting professional help?
While there are many good reasons to get a professional designer to build your website, time and budget may restrict you from being able to appoint one. Here is a table on budget vs features to help you consider your options
| Type | Build it Yourself | Professional Help |
| Static | Not recommended (HTML) | $1,000+ |
| Template/Site builders | Free – $1,000 | $2,000+ |
| Content Management Systems* | Monthly rental | $2,000+ (they build you update) |
| E-commerce | Monthly rental | $3,000+ (they build you update) |
| Blogs | Free | $600 – $1,000+ (they build you update) |
*Content Management Systems (CMS) are highly recommended for non-e-commerce sites and can also contain a blog.
We offer various plans to suit your website build requirements, including Build it Yourself on our high-speed servers via the EBS CRM, Done with You (DWY), and Done For You (DFY). Talk to us today about your requirements and get a non-obligation free quotation. Click here to book a call.
Associated Costs
There are a number of associated costs you need to consider, some of these include:
- Domain name registration @ approx. $40.00 p.a.
You can register and check the availability of domain names yourself through various registrars some popular ones include Netregistry, Crazy Domains & Melbourne IT. We also offer the service here
- Once your domain name is registered you have a number of options:
- Parking your domain – if you want to park your domain to save it for future use there is normally no charge associated. The domain registrar will keep it registered for you and you can just activate it when you are ready for your site to go live.
- Redirect your domain
You can redirect your domain name to point to another already existing website or page on an online directory.
- Web hosting between $20.00 – $150pm+
Without web hosting no one will be able to see your website, this is the essential link in having your website viewable to the outside world. It is important to choose a web host that is reliable and that you can contact for technical support 24/7 in case your website and emails develop problems. Although it is possible to host your website anywhere in the world, dealing with a hosting company in another country can be frustrating. Not only the language barrier but also the long-distance calls are expensive. Email support may be slow outside normal business hours and if they are on a different timeline then your delays are likely to be costly to your business. With a bit of research, you can find a local hosting company.
There are 5 key considerations in choosing a hosting plan for your website, bandwidth, databases, hard disk storage, data transfer, and the scripting technology used.
Most hosting plans will have sufficient hard disk storage for most sites unless you have lots of high-resolution images, audio, or videos. You would normally have enough hard disk space for 100’s web pages with small images.
Why not jump on a call with us to discuss your hosting requirements – click here to book a call
Bandwidth is a measure of the amount of digital information that can be accessed within a given time period. For example, if your main webpage is 300 kilobytes in size, then every time a web browser accesses it, 300kb of data travels down the ‘pipe’. How fast this data is transferred depends on how many people are accessing data down the pipe at the same time and how large your pipe is. If too many people are visiting your website at the same time and your bandwidth is not capable of handling that amount of traffic, you may crash the server and people won’t be able to view your web page until the server recovers. If you do experience a spike or large increase in the number of visitors to your site, in most cases your hosting company will recommend you upgrade to a plan with a larger bandwidth allowance. Similarly, if you are sharing a server with a website that continuously crashes the server due to excessive bandwidth, your site will also be affected. It is worth checking to ensure that your host uses clustered hosting as this hosting model shares the load and the bandwidth to avoid server crashes in these instances.
Data transfer limits are limits imposed by some hosting providers on the amount of data that can be transferred in a given time period (normally a month). If you go over this limit your site may be slow and you may have to pay extra each month for the amount you are over. It’s worth checking that there are no penalties for data transfer limits before you sign up with a hosting company.
Databases are important if you have customers interacting on your site, for instance, if you have a newsletter sign-up, an e-commerce store, site search, forum, blog, or your website has a content management system, these functions use database technology to store the information. In some cases, you may need up to 5 databases and it’s worth checking your hosting plan to ensure it will allow for your required number.
Scripting technology is the code used to build websites, most commonly it is HTML (HyperText Markup Language) other scripts include PHP, Perl, ASP. Unless you are building the site yourself you will not need to know anything about these languages and your website designer will be able to guide you to ensure your web hosting package is compatible and runs the correct scripts to interpret your website.