Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

There’s a vast difference between companies who want to build a website and companies who want to build an online business. The idea of an online business is that it’s more than just a website. It’s a portal to help your business generate more leads, make more online sales or achieve the goal your website is designed to achieve.

I suppose the best explanation of an online business is ‘what you need your web presence to do for you’.

There are a couple of suppliers in the market selling an integrated package that does everything you need to manage your online business, and while they are of exceptional quality, they’re also a tad pricey. So I decided to take a look at what you get with an online business package and find a way to do the same thing on the cheap.

Before I started I asked 3 of my existing clients what they would want from their online business. Other than the odd requests (”I want my website to make me coffee”, “I want to rank no.1 on all the major search engines”, and my personal favourite “Is there any way we can replicate Amazon.com?”), the following responses were pretty much what I expect most companies want from their website:

• The website needs to be easy to update.
• I want to re-design my site annually without having to start from scratch.
• I want to be able to run a blog.
• Visitor statistics mean nothing to me. Can’t we get them in English?
• I want to sign up visitors to an online newsletter, then send them a newsletter monthly using a template you’ve designed.
• Why can’t Search Engine Optimization be built into a design?
• I know it’s important to update content regularly, but I don’t have the time and I hate writing.
• Why do my competition rank above me on search engines?
• I want more traffic from targeted visitors.

A quick glance at this list and I can already see a few ways to do things cheaply or for free. Obviously some of the requests are going to cost money, but we can still make it relatively painless if we’re careful.

This is going to turn into a bit of a case study so I’m going to break up my solutions over the next couple of weeks. Why don’t you subscribe to my RSS feed or by email and I’ll keep you posted.