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Internet

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The Internet with it’s many applications can help small businesses in many ways. It can improve communication, productivity, supply, customer service and efficiency.

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Email is used by all businesses helping to improve communication and speed up decision making. It has also helped greatly in document transferring. Everything can be done so much faster by the internet and less time is wasted. Overseas communication is brilliant and it takes no time at all to communicate with other countries and businesses.

In order to fully exploit internet potential a business should have its own website. This can vastly improve the success of a business. A website enables customers to see your products through online brochures; they could even purchase online making payment by debit or credit cards. Your customers can register and even track there order. They would be able to contact you via email if they needed to.
Your business could benefit from incorporating such things as databases, accounting, order tracking and stock control software can all help your business run smoothly and serve to greatly reduce administration costs.

People within your business will obviously need to access information about the business, this they are able to do using a web browser, and an intranet is a way of sharing information within the business and cannot be accessed by anyone outside of your business.

You will probably find that you need to share a certain amount of confidential information not only within your company but with specified suppliers or customers. You should be able to do this securely using the World Wide Web if you set up an extranet. This would be a private network that can be securely accessed by those specified users.

Setting up a business website

You will need to consider various points if you decide to set up a business website:

Decide on the website domain name and register it. You need to own the domain name before you put your web site up on the net.
Make a list of the content you wish to include in the site, always include your contact details, products, and have an idea what sort of image you wish to portray and what you wish to gain from having a web site. Do you want to include such things as order tracking and online purchasing?
Consider whether it would be beneficial to you to get a professional web designer to create your business website or use an experienced in house person. Your website needs to make an excellent first impression so a customer will return to buy in the future. Make sure the designer is experienced in designing the type and look you wish to have for your site. You should be aware of the cost of building your web site whether you produce it yourself or use a professional it can take time to complete.
Decide who will host your site, you will have to pay to have your hosted.
You will need to market your site, register on search engines to ensure the public can find it. Basically you need to get as much publicity as possible.
Always be aware of who your customers are, make sure your website is easy to use and gives your customers all the information they may require.

Create your own website

You can obtain ready made templates on which you then proceed to add your own content. A lot of companies who host websites will be able to offer you option of ready made templates. Your Internet service provider may have template based packages for you to use.

For a more tailor made individual approach you would be better off using a software package such as Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver which allow you to produce your own templates.

Use a professional to build your site

You should make sure the web developer you have chosen can fulfill every thing you require in you website. Web Designers will concentrate on the impression look and design of your site while Web Developers tend to concentrate on the structure of the site. You do need to be happy with both the look and structure of your site.

The site needs to quick and easy to navigate around. Look for designers and developers with experience of producing websites for businesses like yours. Always have a clear brief of what you want your web site to portray. Consider whether you would wish to have the developer or designer maintain the site in the future or train to do it yourself. Ask what they can do to improve your sites ranking. Is the designer or developer prepared to sign an agreement assigning copyright to you as you will probably wish to have the website as your own intellectual property, not theirs.

Hosting options

In order for customers to be able to see and use your web site you will need to find somewhere to host it. Your Internet service provider should be able to host your site. Most Internet service providers offer their customers enough free space for a simple website as part of their web access package. If your site is too big for this they will usually host it for a flat fee per month.
You can set up your own web server to host your site. However this option is very expensive and you do need to have a lot of technical knowledge it is not worth doing for a simple site that doesn’t use a lot of back-office systems.

For a simple site, costs are usually based on the amount of web space you need. The more pages your site has the more expensive it will be. Graphics can take up a lot of space. Most Internet providers will offer you free space as part of their web access package. There can be extra costs. If you get a vast amount of traffic to your site, lots of people visit it then you may have to pay additional costs.