Web design Bristol: AikonMedia - Full service web design, database integration & online marketing

Getting on the net
A quick guide to creating a web presence for your business.

So you want to get your business or organisation on the net? Before you start, there are a few issues that you really need to think about to get the best results from the internet. These are issues which any web design firm should bring up anyway, but you can help yourself a lot by working through them before you get as far as approaching a design team.

Your name on the net - Domain name issues

As you probably know by now, a company's web address (usually something like www.myname.com, or .co.uk) is known as its "domain name". Before you register your company's name as a domain, you should be aware of the several potential pitfalls and legal issues that surround the choice of name. Good sources of information about this can be found at

http://nicnames.co.uk
and
http://www.netnames.com

Look under the names questions sections

Key issues which need to be thought about during your initial planning

Before anyone can start building a suitable web site for you, you need to work out what you want it to actually DO. This in turn is driven by what you actually need, rather than what you vaguely think you might need. A good way to arrive at finding out what you actually need is to work though the following questions, then you should naturally come to a point where a suitable content and structure for your web site will emerge.

Question 1) Who are my site visitors likely to be and what are their expectations of such a service/web site?

A good place to start here is a little market research. Find out what your competitors have been doing. Make a big chart, and list on it all the good points and weak points of each of their web sites. Categories on your chart could include:

	How do they function, do they achieve something useful to the web visitor? If so, how and why? All content should be relevant and useful, or you quickly drive web visitors away.
	What is missing from these sites in terms of what one of my potential site visitors might want to know?
	How are they organised? Is there a better way to arrange the information so that its easier to understand?
	How do they look? Does the web image give a good or accurate impression of the company? Remember a large organisation can look like a fly-by-night organisation if they haven't gone to the trouble of getting a well designed web site. And the reverse applies too, a small company can look impressive.

Question 2) What is my organisation trying to achieve with a web site?

Is it trying to be an online company brochure?
Is it to actually sell goods and services?
Is it an information resources service, or a mixture of all these things?

From these two questions you can move on to the more nitty gritty stuff...

Go to part 2