There’s no reason that any small business shouldn’t have a website. Even well-established businesses that don’t have products or services that they can sell online can benefit from having a website. As an example, musicians, artists, restaurants, and lawyers can all capture visitor information to tweak their marketing and make sales without relying purely on the customer to stop into their storefront or call them. A website provides your customers and leads a way to learn about you and to see why you’re better than your competition. Even if you have very few visitors to your website, having the URL on your physical promotional material will make you appear more credible and will let your customers contact you through yet another means. It’s a 24/7 form of advertising, and much cheaper than a newspaper ad or yellowpages advertisement.

Here’s a secret that most website designers don’t want you to know. Below is a checklist of the technical prerequisites you need before your website can go online:

• A hosting provider
• A domain name

That’s it! The domain name is an address such as harbordatasystems.com or google.com. Registration of a domain name (.com, .net, .org) is typically around $10 per year.

A web host is basically a computer that someone else manages which serves the PHP, HTML, and image files that your website displays. Hosting can range from $6 per month to $50 per month. When you register for hosting, 99.999% of hosting providers will also register your .com domain for free or a small yearly fee of around $10. Theoretically you could use your personal or business computer as an internet web host, but that probably goes against your internet service provider’s terms of service (they don’t like it when you resell their bandwidth).

Once you have your hosting, you can begin designing the content of your website. We will not go into the specifics of web database development, PHP programming, HTML and CSS markups, or PhotoShop (we went to college for this, there’s no way it can all be covered in a single post), but we will discuss some of the common practices implemented by successful online marketing campaigns.

Content is king on the web. Search engines such as Google and Bing cannot search the text in image files, videos, or Adobe Flash presentations. As a result, it is imperative that you include standard machine readable text in your web pages. Without this searchable text, search engines won’t be able to see if your content is relevant to the needs of a searcher. It’s still good to have images and flash if they make sense to your branding or offerings, but in most cases a minimalistic, clean, and intuitive layout doesn’t need bells and whistles.

Simplicity means accessibility, and accessibility means conversions. Turning a visitor into a paying customer is your website’s only goal. The Webby Awards, which is a group of over 750 web designers, experts, business figures and creative celebrities, nominate and award the best web designs and functional achievements every year since 1996.  If you take a look at the 2009 results (http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php) you’ll notice a trend of simplistic and fluid design, without the clutter and templated designs that most local web developers offer.  If you bombard your visitors with pictures of the family pets and your favorite funny pictures, you’re going to lose credibility. You wouldn’t include that information in print material, would you?

Networking is a broad term, but in this article we’re talking about links. While Google and Bing’s algorithms may be closely guarded, ever-evolving secrets, there are a few constants, and one of them is how many websites are talking about your website. Incoming links (called “backlinks”) are a major player for your search engine rankings.

If you frequent a website that is even remotely related to your business’s offerings, you should try to get a link from their website to yours. If the site you visit is a blog, you might mention your website in a comment. If you visit a newsgroup or forum, leave a link to your website in your signature. On Facebook and LinkedIn, keep your business profile public and join groups that are related to your service or products, or target markets.

Even better, find and join any low cost or free communities that can help your business, and get a listing on their website. The Chamber of Commerce, your church, Young Professionals/JV, SCORE, and many others will gladly include a link to your website if you just ask. As these sites are typically considered reputable resources, Google and Bing give their links a priority in search results. You should also seek out other websites, even competitors from different areas, and simply ask for a link to your site. You’d be surprised how many people will be willing to put your link on their site in exchange for a brief mention of theirs. Product and service review sites are also a great resource, such as Yelp.com and Google reviews. Newspaper and news sites are always looking for a story or press release, too. Even if they don’t publish it in print, they’ll more than likely publish it on their website. Make those contacts, and build your web presence!

Updates are critical for your website. Professional bloggers (people who write online articles for a living) write every day. For businesses that just want to promote their products and keep their existing customers aware, a little less often is OK. When Google and Bing index a site to their database they mark what time it was indexed. Both Google and Bing have been found to “throw the new guy a bone” and favor new content over historic content for their search result algorithms.

Advertising is a different game on the web. The three major paid advertising venues are Google, Bing, and Facebook. There are other free and paid resources available, and they will be mentioned in a later article (check back for updates!). The web lets you split-test marketing methods in a way that is nearly impossible (or at best, inaccurate) in traditional advertising methods. For example, you can create 2 different ad styles with different text and images, and directly see which ad is receiving more attention. You can then drop the slow-performing ad, and split-test more ads and tweaks to existing ads to get the best clickthrough rate.

Web advertising is also notoriously cheap. One reason is that you typically don’t pay for a listing, you pay for results. Wouldn’t it be nice if advertising in the Yellow Pages or newspapers you only had to pay whenever you got a call from the ad? For many ad placements, you might only have to pay $0.10-$0.70 per click from an interested visitor.

At the time this article was written, the search term “Port Charlotte” could give you an additional 224 visitors to your site per day and “Punta Gorda” could bring in 134, from paid advertising alone (which has been proven to often be less effective than organic search results). If you narrow your keyword list to be something more specific, such as “Plumber in Port Charlotte” you could reach more potential customers and keep your advertising budget small, as the hits you’d get from the advertisement would only be from people specifically searching for a plumber in Port Charlotte. Do the yellow pages or newspapers give you that many calls/walkins per day?

We’re by no means saying that you should drop offline advertising. In some cases offline advertising will work better than online advertising, and the success rate is sometimes much higher. For example paper flyers typically have a 2% conversion rate. With online advertising, you might see that closer to 0.2%-1.5% of the people who see your ad actually visit your site. 5000 flyers might cost you $850 for 100 calls (at a 2% success rate), but 100 clicks from interested searchers on a Google ad at $0.10-$0.70/click would cost $10-$70. The design and content those visitors see on your website and how well you capture their information will determine if they become a customer.

Today far more people are turning to the web to search for a business than to the Yellowpages or classifieds. You’re able to geographically target your market, and in some cases, as with Facebook, narrow down their 400 million users to a group of potential customers by age, location, interests, workplace, education, language, and marital status. You can customize your ads to be more interesting and relevant for each demographic. These web advertising platforms will then make sure that your ads only reach those groups of people, at or below the maximum cost per click that you choose, and within your daily budget. They help weed out the noise and send only interested customers to your website. Setting your maximum click price to $0.70 might still only charge you $0.15 per click, depending on the demand and competition for the keywords you choose. At this rate, if your daily budget is set to $10, you could potentially reach 67 highly targeted new local customers that day.

It’s not always possible to get a large amount of traffic, even from paid advertising with Google, Bing, and Facebook. Your ads have to be relevant to the visitors interests, there should be steady enough traffic for the keywords and demographics you specify, and they have to catch their eye. Most web surfers have trained themselves to look past and ignore advertisements. If yours sticks out in a non-offensive and attractive way, is relevant to their interests, and your site is clean and simple, you may get that click and gain a new customer.

Your competition has a website. Why don’t you?

Harbor Data Systems offers website design and hosting services, hosted on 300% green servers (for every 1 energy credit used, 3 wind energy credits are purchased). Order our design services and we’ll provide you with a free domain name and 2 years of unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage space hosting for free. Click here for more information.

Become a customer of our business IT maintenance plan and receive free design services and free hosting! Available to Charlotte County and Southwest Florida businesses only! Click here for more information.

References:

1. http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/gettingstarted/article65204.html
2. http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200609/needawebsite.html
3. http://businessresources.legalzoom.com/why-you-need-a-website
4. http://www.promotionworld.com/internet/articles/06121410Website.html
5. http://www.morebusiness.com/advantages-to-create-website

The Google Keyword Traffic Estimator is just one resource for one search engine. You can try it out here: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox to see how many estimated visitors you’d get per day from your planned Google advertising budget.

The Charlotte County Economic Development Office estimates that the average wage for a Computer Administrator in Charlotte County is $34.75 per hour. Most local businesses don’t require an in-house IT support specialist 40 hours per week, or cannot afford the $1,390 per week to keep them.

Calling a computer specialist only when you need it can also be quite expensive, with most computer businesses in the area offering their services only to residential customers, or charging $80-$200/hr for onsite business support. Those companies will be unfamiliar with your systems and operations, and much of the money you pay will be spent waiting on their technician to investigate, review, and understand your computers and software on a case-by-case basis.

We have a solution for your needs: Dedicated on-call IT support for $1.25/hr., and additional computers or print/networking equipment for only $0.75/hr*

Here’s what’s included:

Become a customer of our $1.25/hr business IT maintenance plan and receive free design services and free hosting (regular $995)! Available to Charlotte County and Southwest Florida businesses only! Click here for more information or contact us to sign up.

• We’ll stop by every week at a time that’s convenient for you (7 days a week, 7am to 9pm), to perform services such as:
  • Routine data backups
  • Ensure applications and drivers are up-to-date with the latest security patches and bug fixes
  • Scan and fix security vulnerabilities and viruses in your computers and network. Your security, stability, and privacy are our top priority.
  • Computer cleaning (interior of case, display devices, hypoallergenic disinfectant cleaning of mice, keyboards and other devices that involve human contact)
• A 100% FREE website. Includes everything you need: hosting, design, and setup. No extra costs for the lifetime of your maintenance plan with us. If you choose to drop the maintenance plan, no problem! We’ll continue to host your website for as little as $20 per month. We’ll design, register, and host your website and email for free with a maintenance contract. If you already have a website, we’ll be happy to help transfer it to our eco-friendly hosting or suggest and make improvements to your existing website configuration. For more information see our 300% Green Hosting page.
• Skype call center setup. For about $90 per year you can have unlimited local and long distance through Skype for Business to multiple phones in your office, and we’ll help set it up! Supports a local call-in number (941 area code), forwarding to mobile phones, individual extensions, touch-tone phone menu systems, individual or group voicemail inboxes that can be forwarded to email, caller ID, call waiting, hold music, text messaging, and more.
• A hand-picked staff member or team to work on your systems for each visit. Building a relationship based on understanding your needs and operations can be crucial, and it will feel like your Harbor Data Systems dedicated IT technician is an in-house employee, sensitive to your workflow and processes.
• Daily data backups and advanced disk imaging practices. If a catastrophic software or hardware failure should occur, we can get you back on your feet quickly. If you use a web-based platform hosted by another company, we’ll be happy to work with your provider to acquire digital backups on a regular basis.**
• Data recovery services. If you’ve accidentally deleted an email or important file, we can help get it back, even if you emptied your recycle bin!
• Fixed IT expenses can provide you with a little extra peace of mind for your business, not to mention the computer security and stability benefits. Automated monthly, quarterly, or yearly payments are accepted from any US bank, Credit/Debit Card, or PayPal. We also accept checks and money orders.
• Redundancy systems. If your Point of Sale computer or inventory database server crashes, what would you do? If you would like that extra peace-of-mind of having a cloned backup available, we can suggest hardware solutions, clone the software system, and set up routine automated backups. If the crash ever happens, getting back into business would be as simple as flipping a switch.
• Uninterruptable power supplies are a must for businesses in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. With our unpredictable weather, power outages are a common occurrence. We can help set up a generator system and/or uninterruptable power supplies for all of your critical electronic equipment. When the power flickers or goes off for hours, your business won’t be affected.
• Thinking of going green? We can make suggestions on the best practices for recycling, purchasing energy credits, and going paperless.
• With a maintenance plan, we don’t make money selling you software or new computers. We want to keep your business by saving you time and money by providing the lowest quotes from trusted suppliers around the world. If there’s a free alternative to software you use, we’ll be sure to tell you about it. We’ll even offer to install it and provide basic training. If there’s an upgrade that can be made to improve your business flow, we’ll give you the expected areas of improvement and manufacturer pricing, and let you decide.
• Provide value to your employees. We’ll give them a 15% discount for home computer services (typically $60 per hour).
• Windows, Linux, Mac, and mobile device support. Everything from email servers, file storage, laptops, point of sale workstations, printers and network devices, and employee desktops.
• We scan and encrypt all documents we create with or for you, and save them on our servers (unless requested otherwise). We will provide you an access code to review and print your documents online, or we can transfer them to disk for you and drop them off. Once scanned, any original non-contractual paper documents are shredded, liquefied, and driven directly (by our internal staff) to an undisclosed recycling facility. Our digital data backups are even more secure. Your privacy is our top priority, so much so that we provide a non-disclosure agreement that binds us to keeping your secrets safe.
• Thinking of implementing new software, but would like to try it out first? We can create a network of virtual machines using disk images from your current equipment, so that you can try your new platform in a safe, non-production environment.
• We’ll inventory the systems covered and host the documentation and details online for you to access whenever you need them.

Since we don’t charge an hourly rate under the terms of the contract, it’s in our best interest to keep your computers and devices running in top condition, as frugal as possible. We will work with your warranty providers and manufacturers for the equipment covered by the maintenance plan, make and implement suggestions to lower the cost of operating your business, and get you back on your feet if there is a problem.

*Based on 40 hour work week, at the contractual rate of $200 for the first computer. Additional optional coverage of computers, printers, routers, or VoIP equipment for an additional $120/mo per unit. We’re available 24/7 for your IT needs, nights, weekends, and holidays.

**Not all 3rd party companies will provide database and file exports of their customer’s data. We will personally speak to the management for any web service you use to attempt to acquire the database exports, at your request.

Contact us today to discuss our business computer maintenance plans by visiting our contact page or give us a call at 941.621.3552.

• 2 years hosting (2gigs hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, 300% green) and a free domain name or existing domain transfer
• Web-based product catalog with online ordering, so customers can shop with you from the comfort of their own homes!
• Unlimited free email hosting (your own @websitename.com)
• Email setup (we’ll help you connect Outlook, your mobile phones, or Thunderbird to your email account)
• SEO and internet marketing advice. We’ll help get your web-presence started, too!
• Advertising assessment. We’ll show you the ropes of geographically-targeted advertising online!
• 6 custom pages, more upon request!

Perfect for membership websites, informative/PR websites, online retail, non-profit (discount available), family and photo/video websites, mobile phones, service and rental businesses, and more!

Want to discuss your new site or the renovation of an existing site? Click here to contact us today!

http://memblog.com/

Memblog.com provides a WordPressMU plugin to allow recurring PayPal payments for access to premium content. Members can set a rate, for example $50/mo, and visitors must pay this via credit card or PayPal to view their blog and shared media. They came to us with the idea, and we made it all happen, including the ability for users to manage their blogs from their mobile phones.

http://www.scriptamp.com

Scriptamp.com is currently focused on one product, MySpace Apps Mogul. They work closely with affiliate marketers to maintain a low-to-no risk marketing campaign.

http://www.pocketmac.com/mobile/

PocketMac.com specializes in data backup software for mobile devices. We created their mobile website from the ground-up, formatted for iPhones, BlackBerry, Android, and other mobile phone web browsers. This allows their customers to visit them from the devices that PocketMac specializes in, and increases repeat businesses.

http://www.thepemberton.com

ThePemberton.com is a personal weblog on topics ranging from Ubuntu Linux, Amazon Kindle, Firefox, programming, computer gaming and cheap or low-cost do-it-yourself projects.

Complete business and personal websites starting at only $995 include:

• 2 years hosting (2gigs hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, 300% green) and a free domain name or existing domain transfer
• Web-based product catalog with online ordering, so customers can shop with you from the comfort of their own homes!
• Unlimited free email hosting (your own @websitename.com)
• Email setup (we’ll help you connect Outlook, your mobile phones, or Thunderbird to your email account)
• SEO and internet marketing advice. We’ll help get your web-presence started, too!
• Advertising assessment. We’ll show you the ropes of geographically-targeted advertising online!
• 6 custom pages, more upon request!

Below is some information that GreenGeeks has provided us regarding how they are eco-friendly:

It’s important to choose an eco-friendly web host. Many people are surprised when we tell them that the internet is not green and that by no means is the web hosting industry eco-friendly. In fact studies show that by 2005 the web hosting industry used as much energy to power their servers as the equivalent of 14 major power plants. Studies have shown that by the year 2020 that the web hosting industry will be as big of a polluter as the airline industry. Click here to read the third party analysis.

In addition to changing the web hosting industry’s environmental impact we have an even greater strategy which we believe will help to spread a greater eco-friendly consciousness, please read about GreenGeeks Green Mission.

It is important that this industry becomes green and GreenGeeks is the world’s most eco-friendly web hosting company. We would like for you to choose a certified green, eco-friendly web hosting company to host your web site. We hope that you will choose to go green with your web site, please allow us to tell you why we feel we are the best option.

Green Power Recognition.
GreenGeeks works with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to buy wind energy credits to offset our energy consumption and to put more energy back into the grid which was produced by wind power technology. In 2009 GreenGeeks was invited to join the US. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Green Power Partner program.

How are we green?
We pull energy from the grid just like every web hosting company. We must pull energy from the grid in order to make sure that we have a constant power flow for our servers and to make sure the servers would not be interrupted by a lack of power. Unfortunately much of the power that flows through our grid today was produced by polluting technologies like fossil fuels.

In order to compensate for the polluting power we pull from the grid we purchase wind energy credits for the energy we consume from the grid. In fact we replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by our servers, so if we pull 1X of power from the grid we purchase enough wind energy credits to put back into the grid 3X of power having been produced by wind power.

Other ways we are green.
In addition to purchasing wind energy credits, we work on all of our servers and reconfigure them so that they run more efficiently using less energy and run cooler. What this means is less energy consumption on the server as well as less energy needed to cool the server. (Co-location data centers are constantly cooled [24x7x365] by enormous cooling fans which use a tremendous amount of energy). These attentions to detail on the servers allow us to be more energy efficient in our data centers, but we don’t stop there.

• Use only what’s needed.
  • We are also hyper conscious about our carbon footprint in our offices. We employ rigorous recycling in our offices and we make sure that only legal and essential documents are printed to conserve paper. Any non essential documents which are printed by mistake are returned to the recycle paper area of the office for reuse in any other printing that we need to do. In addition we employ auto lighting control systems to make sure that the lights are not on when no one is in their offices and we make sure we power down all office equipment when not in use.

• Telecommuting
  • Our hosting also searches for top notch personnel and sometimes we find talented and skilled service personnel who are not located near our offices. Rather than try to relocate these talented employees we allow them to telecommute from home or a shared office near them. This allows some of our employees to not have to commute to work saving money and carbon emissions on gas consumption for their cars.

There are many more minor ways that we are eco-conscious and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we are green, how we may improve and also how your own organization is going green. Please email us at support@harbordatasystems.com with any comments, questions or suggestions.

Conclusion – Our Green Eco-Friendly Hosting
Our commitment to going green extends beyond our own company and the customers we serve. We look at the direction of the web hosting industry and we saw that unless we started to turn the tide sooner rather than later that our industry was headed for an environmental calamity. In addition we saw secondary benefits to promoting green energy hosting through the web hosting community and how individual web sites could help to promote a more eco friendly consciousness through the web.

We sincerely hope that you will choose a certified green web hosting provider, even if you do not choose to host your site with Harbor Data Systems and GreenGeeks.

Technical support/computer repair for home and office, normally only $85 per hour, now $76.50/hr!

Complete website package, design and branding with two years of unlimited hosting, a deal at $995, now only $895.50!

Software development services regular $100/hr, now only $90/hr!

Business maintenance plans, 10% off first 6 months. First computer normally $1.25/hr, now only $1.13/hr* – additional computers normally $0.75/hr now $0.67/hr*!

With deals like this, this won’t last long. Call Harbor Data Systems at (941)621-3552 or click here to use our contact form to get started today.

*See Business IT maintenance plan page for details.

If you’re having troubles installing or using this software, we can help. In Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, or North Port, we can come to you or we can install it remotely. Just give us a call at 941-621-3552 or click here to use our contact form.

Below are some screenshots of the most commonly used OpenOffice suite programs (they all come Free in the standard OpenOffice download package):

Openoffice Writer (Word alternative)

Openoffice Impress (Powerpoint alternative)

Openoffice database (Access alternative)

Openoffice calc (Excel alternative)