stuartmckiernan.com.au

If you don't feel you're attracting the customer's you expected or you would like an independant assessment of your site, feel free to contact me.

If you are a small business or non-profit organisation, I am happy to assess your site on it's own and/or compare it to 1-2 competitors for free - just ask...

The first step to getting your business online is to register a domain name or 'online name' for your business.

If you have not done this already, the most important thing to consider, unless you are a well established & known brand within your market, is not what your actual business name is but what you're selling or what you would like the search engines to know about your site. 

As an example, if your business name is 'Acme Jewellery' and you sell women's costume jewellery in Sydney, rather than register the domain 'acmejewellery.com.au', consider registering 'womenscostumejewellery.com.au' or even 'womensjewellerysydney.com.au'

I'm happy to advise you on an appropriate domain name, register the name, and manage it going forward. Note. There is an annual or bi-annual fee for maintaining ownership of domain names, no matter who you register it through.

Once you have registered a domain name, the domain needs to be hosted somewhere.

I would recommend a hosting service within the country that you live in, especially if your main market is within that country. If you sell or advertise primarily to another country, you should consider a hosting provider in that country.

The reason for this is speed. Slow websites tend to decrease the experience of your website for potential customers. The faster it is for them, the better their experience - the stats are in on this... if your website takes more than a second or two to load, the majority of customers coming to your site will go somewhere else before the page has finished loading. You've probably noticed yourself that long page load times tend to impact your willingness to stay on a site. 

The hosting provider I use is in Melbourne and is connected to the Telstra backbone - this ensures high speeds within Australia and the highest possile speeds for an Aussie site for international visitor.

Note. Hosting providers charge an annual fee to host your domain on their web servers. 

Developing a website is not unlike building a house...

You need to have a solid design based on your needs/wants and then you hand it over to a builder to complete the job. If the job is not scoped out correctly before work begins or design changes are made halfway through the project, this can lead to delays.

Have a look at your main competitor's sites, search google for what you're selling/advertising and take note of what's on offer from the sites that come up on the first page of the search results.

Once you have an idea of the functionality and maybe the look & feel of your site, it's always a good idea to check some of sites on the web that offer website templates for purchase. I recommend Shape5, Rockettheme, and JoomlaXTC for their Joomla templates.

I make these recommendations because I develop websites using Jooma, a template-based content management system (or CMS). This allows me to develop sites that my clients can then manage once the site has been launched. Everything from the colour scheme, to the site images and content can be controlled easily with a good CMS. 

When looking at templates, keep in mind that they are often crowded with information, boxes, and content. My preference is to take a template with the right combination of functionality and aesthetics, and then remove everything that is not necessary - the aim for any website should be to create a clean and simple site that does not overwhelm viewers with content, jarring colours or difficult navigation.

If you do not have a strong feel for what the site should look like, the functionality it should have, or the content you need, that's ok - I can put together a proposed site fairly quickly for you to approve and/or make changes to. 

If you know exactly what you want, fantastic! Let me know and I will create a site mockup for you to critique.

The devil's in the detail with your site template. Just like a house, it needs to be perfect or you'll either a) put up with something that isn't right for you, or b) spend unnecessary money afterwords in re-doing work that should have been done correctly in the first place. 

Search Engine Optimisation is a technique of developing a site so that search engines, like Google, Yahoo, or Bing, can easily work out what the content of your site is.

Whatever it is that you're selling, the market is out there. Just like a physical retail shop, you cannot build it and hope that customers will somehow stumble across you - your potential customers will search for what they are looking for, and if the search engines understand that that's what you have, they will rate you as highly relevant to the search being performed. 

Unless you are a well established brand (eg. Microsoft), your site must be optimised in today's online environment. The steps are not difficult and I will outline them shortly (coming April 2010), in a case study, based on a client's site, that will demonstrate how to optimise a site, and the effect that the process has on driving customer leads to the site.

The final step to setting up an online presence for your business is to consider marketing.

Like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it is not simply enough to build a site and then expect customers to turn up on your virtual doorstep. With a well optimised site, you may well be generating enough customers through the online search engines to not require marketing. If not, it's time to up the ante. 

Marketing can be done in a number of ways from the very basic to significant investment. From experience, my clients initially feel reluctant to spend additional money, beyond site development, to reach potential customers.

There are a limited number of ways to reach the first page of search engine search results yet this can be achieved with a minimal budget. My aim is that for every dollar spent on marketing, the minimum return will be $5.

I offer various marketing services which will be detailed shortly (May 2010) in a case study based on a client's experience of internet marketing, once I have completed my SEO Case Study. I will cover basic to advanced marketing, the cost of each, and the return they generate. 

One thing to keep in mind is that SEO and Internet Marketing rarely product instant results - unless you are using pay-per-click advertising. They often start to produce results 3-12mths after work has begun so it is important to decide on your marketing strategy and get it rolling asap!