But, as with any aspect of your business, some preliminary thinking will help to maximize return on your investment in this key part of your marketing mix.

Here are seven key issues to consider from outset:

1. Are your markets online?

Who are your customers, and are they currently using Internet? Try a customer survey if you don't know answer to this yet.

Alternatively, there may be new markets that you would like to tap, who are already online.

An excellent Web site for researching Internet demographic information is at: http://www.nua.ie/

2. Where is your geographic focus?

Is your operation confined to a local area, or can it have national or even international appeal?

It is not currently possible to restrict display of Web pages within geographic boundaries (e.g. "only Illinois"). So if your business is only local, or you only serve U.S., you should state that clearly on site, otherwise you may receive leads and orders that you can't fulfill.

3. What are specific goals of your site?

What outcomes do you want from visitors to your site? Will you be selling product online, or are you generating leads for a product or service? Do you want visitors to leave their contact details? If so, how will you encourage them to do this? Do you have a newsletter that they can subscribe to, or a competition, or a free offer of some kind?

And don't forget your existing customers. Will your site also be providing ongoing support and education for these clients?

4. How will you engage your visitors?

Information

At beginning, almost every website offered information of some sort. The information was presented as:

> FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions were ubiquitous. Sometimes these FAQs listed user questions, But mostly, website owners concocted questions and presented answers. Fortunately, use of FAQs has decreased considerably, except perhaps on product support pages

> CHECK LISTS - Soon lists became more useful. They indicated things to be considered in planning, buying, designing, building, maintaining or doing specific tasks

> PICTURES - Pictures were originally included on some sites as decoration. But more and more they are now used to provide information: officers of a company, sightseeing locations, images of products

> DRAWINGS AND CHARTS - Drawings were used to explain products. Charts were used a great deal by financial community to depict financial events

> ARTICLES - We soon realized that lists and illustrations are not enough. We began to write articles on every aspect of Internet and on every aspect of products and services we were selling. Today we are in "age of articles". They are everywhere

Learning

After a few years on Net, more people realized that a website should not present information but enable visitors to learn. They realized that visitor learning is key.

Visitors learned directly from website or through experts related to or visiting website. In latter category are:

> EXPERT SITES - A visitor asks a question or presents a problem and an expert replies

> DISCUSSION BOARDS - A continous discussion of issues or problems in a given field

> MAILING LISTS - Similar to Discussion Boards, but executed via email

Discussion boards and mailing lists have an additional virtue: They enable building of a community (deserving of a separate article).

To learn directly from website, we have used: