Let me clarify one point: I am not saying that you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over Internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you certainly should be considering it.

The point to be made here is that you should at very least have a presence on World Wide Web so that customers, potential employees, business partners, and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and products or services you have to offer.

That said, it's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional looking website if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick and mortar store, your website may be first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your website looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

One of great things about Internet is that it has leveled playing field when it comes to competing with big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression and with a well-designed website, your little operation can project image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

You also mention that yours is a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don't care if you are a one-man show or a ten thousand employee corporate giant; if you do not have a website you are losing business to other companies that do. Here's exception to my rule: It's actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad.

Your website speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful website for our customers!" or it says, "Hey, look, I let my ten-year old nephew design my site! Good luck finding anything!"

What does your website say about your business?

Here's to your success.

Tim Knox tim@dropshipwholesale.net For information on starting your own online or eBay business, visit http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

http://www.e-classifieds.net/products/index.html

We should surmise that this solution looks professional. The abundant choice of editions is a good prove to it. Still, researches show, that bigger selection is, more difficult it is to make a decision. And it is really so. Say, you decide that you need one solution and proceed to following edition to make sure you did not skip features that are necessary to your online business. And it turns out that you did. You change decision. While you proceed to third one, you might discover that it has features of second edition, but lacks for features of first. You feel frustrated.

Yet, you can see demo of every edition directly without filling in any web form before it. It contributes to web site popularity and makes product more available.

The script is also realized using Perl and text files and customer support of manufacturer costs $75 - $100 per hour. Maybe this rate is confirmation that company really guarantees an irreproachable performance of their product, and you won’t have to refer to them too often; but support is required more often than you might think, since situations differ.

http://www.esvon.com/products/cl/

Of course, we do pay attention to what program looks like, but its internal mechanism does play a great role. The Esvon specialists have seen to this. You can’t see it, but you can be sure Esvon Classifieds script runs well and allows you to avoid typical problems, web applications owners might encounter.

The well thought out and powerful script, its modularity and flexibility are best qualities distinguished by our customers. It is difficult, however, to judge ourselves, thus, we will enumerate features, which were marked by our customers as practically unique in comparison to other similar solutions:

- Static HTML pages generation allows you to have fast web site, indexed in search engines by more keywords and much more accessible to web surfers.

- The script allows you to handle much more site traffic/visitors queries, then other existing applications; fast running PHP code is also marked as an important peculiarity of program. Just as an example, Esvon Classifieds has unique category tree building engine: it is very fast, with only 2 SQL queries to build an unlimited-level category tree with ads amount per category calculation; it will ensure you that your server won’t be brought down by amount of database queries executed!

While we were preparing this article, we received one more email from our customer, where he compares our product with GeoClassifieds (http://geodesicsolutions.com/products/index.htm), and marks following features as award winning in Esvon Classifieds: template system, Gd or imagemagick thumbnail images, very good support, reviews writing and voting, blocks engine, absolutely custom database fields settings.

http://geodesicsolutions.com/products/index.htm

GeoDesic product features are very attractive. Here it is: case, when you should go deeper. A typical user can claim that it doesn’t matter, what’s inside; it just should work and do what he expects from it. But deeper approach reveals, that script is not able to process properly growing database queries, its templates are not very flexible, it runs slow and it is unable to generate static content.

Using such script you take risk to be very soon removed from shared web server, since your traffic might exceed maximum allowed server load limit very quickly.

Thus, be meticulous while choosing script fro your online business.

We hope, that this analysis has contributed to your knowledge of what you are looking for on Web. In end, you decide, we just help you to see deeper; we hope that we do.

About Author:

Daria Winkler is Co-founder and Principal of Esvon LLC (http://www.esvon.com/) information technology company, providing cost effective software development and outsourcing services to our clients and professional classified ads software for website owners.