Before we do anything else, it is fundamental that you define the objectives and scope of your web site.

Successful web sites incorporate the following:

1. Your business goals
2. The needs, wants, and expectations of your target market
3. Your products and services

Some common objectives are:

• Advertize your product or service
• Sell your product online
• Generate leads or qualify prospects
• Provide customer service or product support
• Provide product or company information
• Promote your company identity or brand awareness
• Create an information resource to establish trust and credibility
• Create ad revenue
• Earn affiliate commissions for sales and leads your site generates for other companies

An effective web site usually has one—and only one—primary objective. However, most web sites also have secondary objectives. For example, the primary objective of The WEB Shanty web site is to generate leads and qualify prospects. A secondary objective is to provide information about web marketing so that we can establish trust, credibility and value with you.

• Your site should be optimized for search engines.
• Your site should encourage repeat traffic.
• Your site should inspire goodwill and loyalty with your customers.
• Your site should be "sticky" so that visitors will spend time exploring your site.
• Your site should make it very easy for your visitors to find their way around your site.
• Your site should make it very easy for your visitors to contact you.
• Your site should encourage visitors to recommend your products or services to others.

Your web site will be most effective if it is designed specifically to appeal to certain target markets. A web site that tries to market to “everyone” is at best ineffective and at worse is a waste of your valuable marketing budget.

We will help you understand and choose your target markets.

We'll help you determine a good web site strategy that will drive more customers to your business. There are many web marketing techniques that may work well for your business such as:

• Search engine optimization
• Establishing in-bound links to your site
• Listing your site in specific web directories
• Pay-per-click search engine positioning
• Banner ads
• Maintaining a blog
• Email newsletters
• Viral marketing techniques

Learn more about Web Marketing Strategies here

Your web site should:

1. Attract customers
2. Convince customers to buy from you

We'll help you determine what content and features your web site should have based upon your goals for your business.

If you haven’t done so already, we'll help you choose a good domain name (the web address) for your web site. We'll register this domain name on your behalf so that you will own it. After the first year, you will have to pay an annual fee to the domain service registry to maintain ownership of your domain.

We'll setup a hosting service for your web site. This is where your web site “lives” on the internet. The web hosting service company will charge you a monthly service fee to host your web site.

We'll conduct an in-depth survey of similar sites to yours to see what your competitors are doing. We want your site to be more effective than theirs and we don’t want to overlook anything that might leave you at a competitive disadvantage.

Features are those things that provide functionality and utility to your web site. We want to identify anything and everything that will drive the design of your site. For example:

• Product photos
• Shopping cart
• Blog
• Contact Us form
• Tell-a-friend links
• etc.

Keywords and phrases are those words that search engines use to determine the content of your site. It is critical that the keywords for each page be tentatively determined before we start developing content. This will help us to write coherent and relevant copy that will maximize your search engine rankings.

A site map is basically a plan of your web site detailing the structure of your web site. It will show what pages your web site will have and how they are organized. It will function as the “blueprint” of your web site.

The navigation scheme determines how your visitors will travel from one page to another. Your web site must be easy to use and must enable your visitors to quickly find and navigate to the content they want to see.

Learn more about web site usability here

We are now ready to produce the actual content that will be on each web page. Not only will we be writing web copy (the actual wording of the content in marketing-friendly terms), but we’ll also be creating any supporting graphics and media.

After we have the above things in place, we'll design the detailed graphic design of your web site. This includes the integration of your logo and any graphic banners, choosing a matching color scheme, and designing the actual page layouts.

Now that we have all of the content and design elements in place, we'll build your web site.

After we build your web site, we'll thoroughly test it for usability, broken links, etc.

We'll design your web site to be search-engine friendly which enables search engines to easily "crawl" your site for content. We'll optimize your web site for search engines by:

• Re-work the web copy as necessary to emphasize the page keywords and phrases
• Create keyword-rich meta tags
• Ensure that multiple alternative navigation schemes are in place such as page links and footer links
• Create an XML site map that search engines such as Google and Yahoo! use to determine what pages are in your web site and what their URLs are
• Ensure that all of the page URLs are easily readable by search engines and that they match the page content
• Make sure that the page content is well structured using xhtml header tags
• Other optimizations