The Internet - Is it right for your business?

The Internet is a wonderful tool that allows your company to have a worldwide presence. If you are doing any of the following, a web page may be beneficial to you:

Product catalog
Newsletter
Inventory price lists
Sell a product or service nationwide or worldwide.

Setting up your company's web page requires a few preliminary steps. Most of the costs associated with your web site are fixed (ISP), or one-time (site design).

Set up with an ISP (Internet service provider) - $20.00/month.

An ISP is your personal window into the Internet. Services such as AOL usually charge a flat monthly fee for unlimited access to the Internet and most provide a local telephone number for connection. E-mail is an integral component of your ISP's service, and you will be provided with an e-mail address such as yourname@aol.com.

Register your domain name - $14.99 / year.

Your personal domain name can be registered with a variety of companies. Fees range from $5.99 to $35.00 per year depending on the registrar. You can pay for up to 100 years! The domain name you choose must follow a strict set of rules and cannot infringe on another companies trademark, copyright or domain name.

Domain names can include up to 256 characters and must end with an approved suffix (com, org, net, etc.)

Sign up with an IPP (Internet Product Provider) $25-$100/month

Your IPP hosts your web site and makes it available to the rest of the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. An IPP must provide redundancy (multiple servers) and continuous high speed telephone access to the Internet backbone. Most IPP's charge a one-time setup charge of $30 - $100.

Design and publish your web site - Variable

The cost of web site design depends on numerous factors such as the number of pages, images and overall page complexity. The going rate is anywhere from $50 to $500 per page.

Advertise your site to your local community - Free

Include your domain name on your business cards, yellow pages ad, and advertising. The people most likely to use your site is your existing customer base.

Web community - Free

Once you have published your site, you should advertise its existence with the rest of the Internet community. General purpose search engines (www.google.com or www.yahoo.com), industry specific search engines (www.doublewide.com for the manufactured housing industry), trade groups (www.cmhi.com for the California Manufactured Housing Institute). Listing your site with all of these sources is free or included in your annual membership.

Search engine advertising (Pay per click)

This is an excellent way of presenting your product at the top of the search engine listings. Google offer the most impressive program. You can budget the amount that you want to spend per day (as little at $0.01) and have track the results on-line.

Track your results Free from your IPP

Most IPP's provide a simplified web site statistics program. This tool will show you the number of "hits" per file, most popular pages, daily and hourly site activity and which search engines are passing you leads. You can also purchase programs that will track your sites' activity with greater detail.

See Advanced Internet Tips for further information.