5 Things You Need to Check Before Starting a Website

Setting up a website for your business is not something that can accomplish overnight. If you want to increase your product sales, prospective customers should be able to visit your website and get more information about your business. If they find your website unattractive or they didn't find the information they are looking for, they might close the tab immediately or just look for other websites.

This is the reason why before you go on live, you need to decide carefully how your website should look and what information is necessary for visitors to find useful and/or entertaining.

Identify what your target audience needs

Building a website has a purpose of attracting more customers to patronize or buy your products. It means you should understand exactly what they want to know. You can conduct a survey or try to engage with them via social media. This will allow you to list down the information that they want to know such as product descriptions, promotions, and other services. You can prioritize this information when designing the website.

Check other existing websites

It also helps if you check other websites just to find out which ones are doing well. You may consider benchmarking these sites and create a better version for your own business. Of course, don't just copy what has already been put up. You just want to see what kind of strategy works so that you can do something of the same type, or probably even better.

Collect pertinent information

Before publishing your own website, make sure that everything is properly organized. You must have the complete list of products to sell, prices, descriptions, images, as well as other details. There should also be articles that provide more information that the people can read and learn more about your products' or services' benefits, advantages, and purposes. Your business contact information, as well as your office location should also be visible for people's reference. And if you want to continue interacting with them thru social media, it should also be published online. Starting a website without having all these information available is a big no-no.

Think of an overall theme

Aside from having all the important information, you need to have a theme in mind for your website. For example, there are sites with a darker motif to create a stronger or braver vibe, while others have a relaxed or comfy feel. You can also incorporate the appropriate background music with your chosen motif to add an impact or effect to your site visitors. When deciding your website's theme, consider your product and the image you want to portray to your target audience.

Search for the best web designer

Once you have everything planned out, you can now proceed in searching for the best web designer that can accomplish the job. The good thing is that it is easy to look for experts in Oxford Web design. Aside from the concept that you already have, you need a design expert in order for your website's concept and theme to materialize. You also need someone to do the maintenance in case something goes wrong with your website.

Services Every Startup Business Should Have

When we say “startup,” it usually means the business begins at a relatively small scale, but still needs to have services even if they don’t have sufficient budget or personnel to provide such. Remember that you still need to compete with other companies that may have the resources to hire expert staff dedicated to specific services. Fortunately, the beauty of today’s technology and the Internet can cut down or provide these services at reasonable cost or at no cost at all.

General Marketing

Almost every startup business and existing ones today has a website, as it should be since this is the digital age. Having a website is one of the biggest steps in marketing in order to give exposure to your products or brand. And it’s one thing to have a really nice website (an ugly site won’t get you visitors, by the way) and it’s another matter to have good analytics, page authority rankings, inbound links, and search engine optimization (SEO) so people can find your website.

Social Media Management

This is also the age of social media so not having any form of social media marketing is a form of startup suicide. In today’s competitive social media environment, startup businesses need several social media accounts, often just for people to find the actual business website. In fact, just having a website is no guarantee people will find your business. Social media services allow potential customers real-time inquiries that should also be responded to in real-time. In some cases, some sales can even be closed on social media without the buyer even visiting the startup’s website.

Customer Relationship Management

This is quite different from the customer relationships you strike up on the website and social media. It’s more of keeping track and following up on potential and present customers. It’s one thing to make a sale, but it’s another thing to keep track of that customer and get that person to talk about your product or brand to other people. This management aspect also needs to keep track of e-mail and hangout conversations (some customers still prefer the good ‘ol e-mail), as well as contacts and deals made with other companies or suppliers. This includes all current deals existing and recent tasks involving suppliers. It also involves creating a list of contact fields for all present customers.

Accounting

Of course accounting is important because accounting doesn’t just involve overheads and operational expenses and counting profits. Accounting involves invoicing, sales, payments, and billings that all involve customers. Keeping monetary track of what your customers are buying and repeatedly buying will translate later to marketing analytics. Also, showing your customers that you can provide effective billing, invoicing, etc. is showing them that you are an effective and competent business.

Project Management

If your startup business is into providing some form of service rather than products, then you need to rely on a really effective project management in order to provide your customers the service they truly deserve, and are paying for. You need to monitor your workforce, keep proper files, resources, to-do lists, and constant updates of everything that is conveniently organized.

Do Startups Need a Dedicated Tech Support Team?

Since startup businesses will always start small or medium in size, one essential on its to-do list is a dedicated tech support team.

Some of the young entrepreneurs may simply counter this by saying that a dedicated tech support team is expensive and besides they just plan to put all their hard earned money in the bank while launching their startup. But the fact is, plain hard work is not the only element to a successful and growing business. A dedicated tech support team maximizes the probability of success.

No business today can avoid using technology

And today’s technology deals with computers, the Internet, gadgets, etc. No business today can run itself without technology, even if you’re only selling bananas. In the early days, all you needed to hire aside from employees was an excellent lawyer and business and tax consultants. Today, you need to include a good IT guy that eventually becomes a small IT team and this includes the guys for tech support. It’s not enough to just buy computers and use them.

Analyzing the tools you need

Your tech support or IT team can analyze and guide you to the proper online or offline applications that your business needs to be more efficient. No business lives anymore on just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And you don’t even need to spend so much because your tech support team can show you the free (Yes, free!) that’s out there and ready to use.

The team can support you on social

You and the other employees may be too busy with the business details to worry about marketing stuff and social media support. Your tech support team can do that for you. Social media is free anyway so once you open accounts on it, you’ll need people to address those daily inquiries, perhaps on Facebook or Twitter.

Who’s gonna build up the business knowledgebase?

Even if you, the proprietor, are an IT guy, you couldn’t do it alone. And that knowledgebase will really come in handy when they’re available to support your customers in real-time. Your tech support team can organize, create a library of topics surrounding your business, introductory materials, tutorials, manuals, and online FAQ’s, just to mention a few.

… And if something breaks down…?

This is central crux of all the reasoning for having a dedicated tech support team. Should one of your computers, gadgets, or even your Internet breaks down, you’ll have a team available to immediately fix things rather than lugging everything to a repair shop.

Of course, if cost is really an issue and you don’t have enough of an overhead, you can always outsource your dedicated tech support team. For an annual subscription fee, this outsourced dedicated tech support team can do everything mentioned above, and more. So with this, you now have to two options to choose from, or perhaps combine the two if need be.