Why do you need a website?

The answer is that you don't ... necessarily. A website is only part of an overall ebusiness, or more correctly, business strategy, and as part of an overall strategy is unique to the individual business. You do not need a web presence just because someone told you that you need one, or that everyone else has one.

There are many reasons why a business would want to develop an ebusiness strategy encompasing a web presence, and the resultant website would be developed around these needs. For example a hotel/guesthouse may want to market itself to a more international audience, or a retailer may want to open up new markets for their sales, you may want to provide support information for your customers, or provide your customers with upto date news of your company and its products.

It is essential that before you start to develop your web pressence that you are clear about the function that you want it to undertake. There are many resources that you can use to improve your understanding of the range of functions of websites including Scottish Enterprise Borders and members of the Scottish Borders Ebusiness Forum.

Many companies take the plunge and create a web presence but there is no mechanism in place to tell if the site is working.

Any scale of ebusiness development will incur a cost and it is essential that you put the mechanisms in place so that you can assess the return on your investment. One way of doing this is to get feedback on how many visits your site gets from statistics provided by your host. These statistics can show where people are coming from, which pages they are visiting and which pages they are leaving from. They can also show which search engine if any refered the visitor to your site and which words they used to find you in the search engine. If you do not currently get this information you may want to think about changing to a host who does provide them

Other questions that you need to ask about your current site are:

• Is the site search engine friendly
• Is it listed in appropriate web portals/directories
• Does it meet the the standards for accessability by disabled visitors.
• Is the site easy to navigate/read
• Are the pages quick to download, and the images optimised for the web.

As this short intoduction to some aspects of developing an ebusiness strategy for your business shows there are many complex issues to take into account. It is vital that, whatever level of investiment, you get the advice from professionals in order to maximise the benefits to your business