What sort of website do you need?
Below is a simple introduction to each of main genres of websites to help you understand what best fits your requirement.
Brochure Website
A company portfolio site acts as an advert for your company and its products and services. The site should normally have a series of pages including your business’s custom logo design, with content explaining to people about your organisation and giving important information about what you have to offer. Essentially, it serves the same job as your printed brochure but allows you to reach a much wider audience and saves you the print and postal costs.
A brochure website can also include an integrated blog, so that you can combine the benefits between a traditional information site and the new blog marketing.
Blog
There is a lot of talk about blogs and blog marketing but you might not be familiar with what it means in practice. Basically, blog is an abbreviation of weblog, and as the name suggests it is a kind of an online diary. This may sound irrelevant from a business point of view but it does have some real benefits.
It’s great if you want to write regular dated posts on a topic related to your company or your personal interest. For example, you can publish industry news, tell the story of your business, or demonstrate your professional expertise by giving regular advice to your customers.
It also has the added feature that it enables readers to subscribe to your posts and to write comments, which is a good way of engaging your target customers in dialogue.
Just like any website, a weblog has a proper domain name and will be indexed in Google, but the objectives and structure are different from a full brochure site.
As mentioned above, a blog could be integrated as a section of your brand’sinformation website.
E-commerce Website
An e-commerce website is an online shop. It is quite different than a brochure or blog website because it not only displays information and products, but can take orders directly from customers and process credit card payments.
This takes your site to a new level, from a powerful marketing tool to a direct source of revenue.
Other Features
There is no end of possibilities to what can be achieved with a website and there are many more possibilities such as online communities, and interactive games.
Anything is possible and you are really only limited by your imagination and your budget. Even a basic website can be optimised for your needs with additional features such as:
• Event registration forms
• Clocks and calendars
• Photo galleries
• Fund-raising widgets such as Justgiving.com
• Web 2.0 marketing tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube integration
You should also give a careful thought about factors such as accessibility and seo web design to ensure that your site is easy to find and simple to use, as well as ensuring that your brand design looks great on the internet.
Whatever the size or type of your company, a website can form a integral part of your marketing efforts. The important thing is to think carefully about what you really need from a website and what your customers are likely to want it to do.
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