The Small Business Development Center of Hampton Roads, Inc. is the service provider of first choice for the region’s small business community. By offering free, confidential one-on-one business counseling, low-cost training, research through SBDCNet and referrals to top-flight service providers, we assist in maintaining and growing this vitally important segment of the region’s economy.
Internet Penetration at 66% of Adults (137 Million) Nationwide
According to the latest data from The Harris Poll®, fully two-thirds (66%) of all adults are now online. This includes more than half (55%) of all adults who access the Internet from home, almost a third (30%) who access it from work, and almost one in five adults who go online from a school, library, cyber cafe or other location. Of course, some people are online from two or more places. The Harris Interactive Poll, 2001.
Why you need a website?
With everyone regardless of age, race, or nationality going online, it is more important than ever for your business to have a presence on the web. A website can help your company, whether you own a real estate company and only want to show pictures of your properties, or you want to have a complete shopping system and sell your products online without ever talking to the customer. Not only can the web provide a great, new way to market your business, and sell your products, it can also provide a substantial cost savings to the company by performing functions that would normally require human labor. Without any human intervention, products can be sold, credit card orders can be taken and approved, and reports can be generated. Your online orders will be confirmed by email and the only thing you will have to do is receive the orders and send out the product.
The Top 10 Benefits of e-Commerce
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to e-Commerce by Rob Smith, Mark Speaker, and Mark Thompson.
Getting Online
Once you decide to take your business online, you will need to register your domain name and find the right website hosting service for your company. The domain name should be short enough for people to remember and type into their internet browser. You might also want the domain name to include keywords, so that your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address will rank higher in the search engines.
Website hosting may be a service that you get from your current internet service provider (ISP). Finding a website host, who will host your site on their server, is necessary to publish your site to the web for others to see. Before signing up for a website hosting service, you will need to research how much storage space you will need for your site, how many email accounts you get with the service, the limit on data transfers, and several other factors. These factors will be affected by the type of website development software you use, databases and multimedia on your site, and whether you want to sell products online.
Once your site is up and running, bringing traffic to your site will be an important factor in the success of your online venture. You will need to make sure that the content of your static web pages and meta tags is optimized to contain the correct keyword phrases that you want people to use to find your site on the web. Search engines will use these keyword phrases to rank your site. When people do a search, it will be the keywords they type into the search engine that determines whether they find your site. There are also other ways to bring traffic to your site, such as ad banners on other popular sites, sponsor listings in the search engines, and most importantly, a listing in Yahoo! To get your site into the Yahoo! directory, it costs $299 just to have you site reviewed, then $299 annually once your site is listed.
Virginia Electronic Commerce Technology Center
To learn more about electronic commerce, visit http://www.vectec.org/researchcenter/. If you have questions or want to learn how they can help you get your business online, contact the Virginia Electronic Commerce Technology Center at (757) 594-7092 or visit their website at http://www.vectec.org/.
