When almost everyone of us spends 80% of our time online, be it from a computer screen, tablet PC or smartphone, no business can afford not to have an online presence. Indeed there are more and more businesses that only exist as websites on servers bringing information, entertainment and products to their visitors. So developing the right kind of online presence is not only crucial for a business but also imperative and there are a few facts that you need to be utterly focused on from the very moment when you start thinking about creating a website.

Zero in on your goal

It may not seem like much but the sad thing about many web developers today is that they do not really have a goal in mind but a dream. And dreams can be dangerous because they work on word association, they fly from one concept to another and leave you with feeling happy about them but they rarely can be developed into structures. So if you have a message you want to get across than focus on the message and use simple monetizing solutions like AdSense to bring in some money. But then again, if you want to sell something, say an eBook, then make sure that you don’t give away every secret that is in the book to readers of the site. That way some people won’t buy the book because they will have learned everything they needed on the site and those that buy the book will feel cheated out of their money.

Designing your brand

So now that you have a clear understanding of what you would like to send across to your visitors and how you are going to get your money’s worth out of it you can begin to get your hands dirty and start working. And the most important thing you need to think about is the brand of your site since this is the first thing that most people will see and what they are going to associate you with. In a site this is most often the web address and the logo that you will be using and there are two paths that you can follow: you can either create a brand that is simple and tells everything about you from the start, say booksoncooking.com or you can create something completely original and push it until people begin to associate it with you, say facebook.com. Either way is good but make sure you don’t get trapped in between and create something that doesn’t really say anything and is difficult to remember.

Developing content

The next obvious step is to develop the kind of content that your visitors will appreciate well enough to make them want to come back. And here that old saying about a wordsmith being worth his weight in gold is certainly true, but the fact is that we have long passed the days when words were the only way to create powerful images. Today a good photos resource can be just as valuable and, depending on the content on your site, you may even want to think about videos: the only way to tell a powerful story nowadays.

Reaching your audience

However, from Google’s standpoint, the written word is still instrumental for its search algorithms to work so you will need to learn to tame the ever shifting tides of SEO or think about hiring a SEO company. There are other ways to target a specific audience but as far as being the one they find when they search for whatever you have to provide, that is really the best and, ultimately, the cheapest way to get your point across.

Author:

Leo Preston studied and holds a bachelors degree in Psychology. She has been working as a content developer for Best Web Hosting Fans since 2011, and also specialize in social Medias and web presence management.