Things to consider:
Maintenance – How often will you update or check over the site? Who is responsible for this task? Do you or your staff members need training so updates can be done in-house?
Responding to e-mails, comments, questions – How quickly can you respond to customer queries or potential e-mail orders? If you don’t have the resources to check your computer frequently through the day, you might want to consider stating so on your website or setting up your e-mail so it sends customers an “auto-reply” when they e-mail you. This would let customers know that you’ve received their e-mail but if they need immediate service they should call the shop directly.
Link with partners – Do the local businesses you work with have a website? If so, ask if you can trade links to help drive traffic to your website. If you can work out a number of deals, put these links on a ‘Partners’ page and never on your home page. After all, you’ve done the work to attract these customers so you don’t want them jumping right from your page to someone else’s.
Schedule promotions – Devise a schedule that outlines your shops upcoming promotions. This way you can get the news of the sale up on your website and have the promotion promptly removed from the site once the sale is over.
Market your website – How will you let customers know about your new website? Consider adding a website to your logo, shop sign, stationary, business cards and any material (sticks, cards) that you include in orders.
Testing your website:
Check your links – Download a free program called XENU (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download) to make sure you don’t have an broken links or 404 errors. The program will scan your website looking for problem links and continue to scan until you’re error-free.
View your site in different browsers – Have a look to see what your site will look in the various browser programs that your visitors could be using. Browershots (www.browsershots.org ) is a website that will do just that for you – just enter your website address.
Monitor how long your visitors will wait – Once again, you can look to the web for help with this one. There are still users out there with dial-up so you don’t want to keep them waiting. Visit www.websiteoptimization.com to try a free website speed test to see how long your site downloads.
If you are still looking for more information about marketing your website or just your site in general, this detailed article (http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/the-best-damn-web-marketing-checklist-pe.php ) at www.searchengineguide.com covers 23 web topics with 400 items that range from website development, search engine optimization, accessibility, etc.
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