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By Northern Virginia Worldwide Website Should your business be on the Web?If your business is strictly local, and your customers are mostly local people, then you will only benefit from Internet users in your immediate area. Still, in Northern Virginia, there are an unusually high number of Internet users. Therefore, there is a real advantage advertising in terms of customers and communications (as well as the image-building aspect of being on the Web). For example, book stores, music stores, and gourmet food shops have all used the Web to good effect. You must determine whether any of your present customers are the type who may be using the Internet. In this area, they usually are. If you do business with people outside your locale (or would like to) then for you the Web may be an extremely promising medium. National and regional companies, visitor and tourist-oriented companies, as well as any company involved in high tech, telecommunications, software, mail order or specialized products or services are prime candidates for obtaining a whole new source of ready, willing and anxious customers by advertising on the World Wide Web. A Web site may be also a very good place to disseminate product information, to announce new products, to answer frequently-asked questions, and simply build or maintain a national corporate image. The Web is, in addition, a good place for charitable and political organizations to set up shop. The Web is an extremely flexible and powerful medium with which to make a point. Pages may be updated continuously, and can employ video and audio, as well as striking graphics. With a few keyboard strokes pages can be linked to other organizations, or to government information sites; the ability to point your visitors directly to source material is a persuasive tactic that has no equal in any other medium. There are many other possibilities, of course. For example, the cost of maintaining a small web site is so low that writers, artists, musicians, and other professionals who wish to maintain a world-wide presence can easily do so. Even an outboard repair shop might be a good candidate for a Web page, if the owner specializes in collectable antique motors and hard-to-find parts. If you can imagine a way in which the Web might help your business, it may be worth a try. What equipment is required?Strictly speaking, you don't have to own any equipment at all to set up a Web site. You can rent Web space on your choice of many servers, and hire a firm to design and maintain the site. Northern Virginia Worldwide Website provides design and maintenance of web pages. However, to take full advantage of the Web, you should at least be capable of receiving and sending email, since Web users will wish to contact you as conveniently and quickly as possible. You can alternately include toll free or regular telephone or fax numbers in your presentation plus your address. You may lose some customers without an email address, but you're still doing much better than the static company with no web presence. Fo email, you'll also need a modem and an access provider. Your provider can be one of the large information services such as Compuserve or America Online, or you can get a direct Internet connection... often for less than the cost of an online service subscription. If you use email sparingly, AOL or Compuserve, Prodigy or Microsoft Network are considered easy to use with lots of support. However, a direct connection company may be the choice if you will be using many hours on the Internet. Still, you don't get the other benefits (if you use them) of AOL and the others. Regardless, we suggest using the Netscape browser, which is the most advanced and used by 70 to 80 percent of all users (Microsoft's Internet Explorer is also considered very good). What is HTML and is it as easy as it looks?HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and at the entry level it is indeed almost as easy as it looks. Given suitable supervision and training, computer-literate personnel are capable of performing the day-to-day maintenance on many sites. The concept is very simple: HTML is a system of tags that mark the text and images of your page so that it can be displayed properly by any browser, on almost any computer. It incorporates the very powerful possibility of near-instantaneous linkages between any and all of the millions of documents that comprise the Web. Its great advantage is its portability, and this portability is what opens the World Wide Web to the world. However, the fact that it is so easy to mark up pages that will display properly does not mean that any novice can design an effective Web presentation. It might occasionally happen, but it's a rarity. An hour spent cruising the Web will show you plenty of horrific examples of amateur Web design. Like any other form of communication, high-level Web design is a subtle and complex skill that takes time (and a degree of aptitude) to master. Furthermore, though it's easy to write HTML that looks good in one of the many browsers currently in use, it's not so easy to write HTML that works well in all browsers. The best HTML authors currently use a subset of the standard-in-development known as HTML 3. This allows them to take advantage of those advanced features supported by Netscape, the current browser-of-choice on the Web, and still produce pages that don't fall apart when accessed by those other browsers. How can you tell good Web design from bad?In creating a Web site, there are lots of design decisions beyond the technical ones covered above. As in any medium, there are effective ways to communicate and ineffective ones. When evaluating a Web design firm, there are several warning signals that may indicate a lack of design sense and/or professional qualifications. Many of the "designers" competing for your business are young hopefuls who discovered the Web last week and want to earn as they learn. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, if they can do a good job for you. However, when you look at a Web designer's home page, be cautious if you find one or more of the following Bad Signs:
This should help you to avoid the least competent of the hundreds of poor web designers who want your business. The organization of your site, the pattern of linkages within your site, the choice of external links, the manner in which the site is presented to the search engines, even the order in which the information is presented are relevant to the success of the site. Don't try to break down the elements (design, content, presence, marketing, communications, image) too much, either in cost or in thinking out your online marketing program. Keep the big picture in mind. What's the first step?
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