Why Do You Need A Website?
Times are changing. It makes no difference if your business is home-based, local, regional or international in scope or whether you sell jewelry, hardware, tractors, or computer software. Even if are a service provider of accounting, legal or landscaping services, a web site has become as much of a necessity as a telephone and an email address for doing business in today's marketplace.

What Are The Advantages Of Having A Website?

Extend Your Business Hours Without Increasing Payroll Expenses
A web site is available 24x7. You can be open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no cost for additional employees to man the phones or wait on the customers. This is perfect for all the Night Owls who want to do their comparison-shopping in the wee hours. A well designed web site can answers all of their questions while you sleep peacefully. You can even provide contact email address so someone can get back to them during regular business hours if they still have questions. How can you beat 24x7 customer service with a normal 40 hours a week payroll expense price tag?

Showcase Your Products and Services
A web site is a great way to begin building a relationship with your prospective customers and keep your business name in front of your existing customers. What better way to entice someone to purchase a product than to present a full color picture of the product with descriptive text describing all of the reasons someone would want this particular product. All the while reminding them that YOU are their best source for purchasing the product.

Advertisers talk about something called Top Of Mind Awareness or TOMA for short. What they are talking about is having people think of your business first when asked a question about a specific product or service. For example, most people think about Dominos when asked about take-out pizza. Do your customers think of you first?

Educate Your Customers About Your Products and Services
By providing explanations on how to use your products online, you can provide a valuable service to your customers without tying up all of your time with one-on-one explanations. Now, you can refer customers to previous "how-to" articles or to an on-line tutorial first. Then, you need only answer any questions they may still have after reading the "how-to" article or the on-line tutorial.

But, the real time saver for the small business is that this type of product support can usually be done by email. No more telephone calls when you are trying to close a sale. Email product support allows you to help your customers during slow times of the day, during scheduled time periods or when you just have some free time. Most web hosting packages include at least a few email accounts that use your web site's address (e.g. support@yourcompany.com)

Share New Product Ideas With Your Customers
What do you do if one of your customers finds a great new use for one of your products?

Informing all of your customers individually would be time consuming at best and could be downright expensive at worst. Instead, you can put the new information on your web site. Then you can just direct your customers to the proper place for a full explanation. And best of all, the information is always available to your customers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Conduct Surveys To Improve Customer Service and Sales 
How much do you think your sales would increase if you knew what your customers really wanted?

You can use your website to find out. Just put a survey on your web site and ask your customers to help you provide them with better products and services.

How Can I Get Started Doing Business Online?
You must first be certain that you understand the process of selling on line. Click here for more information.

The necessary components for a small business to be successful on the internet are:

• Business Website - the website should reflect the unique "personality" of your business.
• Website hosting - a hosting must provide fast and reliable service.
• Shopping Cart - a shopping cart is necessary if you sell two or more items. Your customer needs a place to store the items they want to buy until they are finished shopping.
• 4) Payment Gateway - a payment gateway is necessary for credit card information to be transferred from your web site to the credit card company. Payment gateways can be purchased separately but are usually bundled with the merchant account service.
• 5) Merchant Account - a merchant account is required to accept credit card payments online.
• 6) Security Certificate - a security certificate is necessary to provide secure connections for online information. This provides encryption to be certain that your customer's credit card and personal information is kept private. Security certificates can be applied for individually but are usually included with the payment gateway.