A: A well designed website acts as your company’s online brochure where customers can find out about you anytime they want from any part of the world.

Q: How cost-effective is it?

A: It is the cheapest of all other mediums that allow you so much convenience as exposure. You never have to print anything, including brochures and coupons. Everything will be on your website and the website users will print what they need. Try and imagine the savings in that alone. You will never even have to buy address lists, print them out, making out each object to be mailed separately, and on and on. Then there is the fact that you have to pay to advertise in yellow pages, magazines, newspapers, and so froth, while you can submit your information to online search engines for free.

Q: Can small businesses profit by having a website?

A: When people visit your website, they will never know whether you are big-biz or small-biz. That is the beauty, sitting behind a well designed and smooth running website; you are as big as any of the others out there. You can project yourself like a large corporation too if you want. It is all about the image you choose to present.

Q: Why not just have ads or brochures?

A: The biggest reason is that they cost too much and involve too much work while opening your business to a very limited market. Can you imagine your ads and brochures reaching a targeted market of millions of consumers through a newspaper or yellow pages? Through your website you can focus on a specific type of internet user and deliver your ads to them directly. Printed material can be discarded or thrown away, or just used for some unprintable purpose. Your website is always under your control and always there for anyone to see the way you want it to be seen. It cannot be abused, it can only be promoted.

Q: What is e-commerce?

A: Doing business on the internet means you are involved in E-commerce. It basically stands for Electronic Commerce or online business where consumers visit online stores and catalogues, select their options, gather everything in a virtual shopping cart, go to checkout, pay with a credit card, and they are done shopping, mostly without having to leave their chair. And you get to make a sale without having to maintain a real shop.

Q: How will people find me on the Internet?

A: Believe it or not, the most powerful advertising method is still word-of-mouth. That is why you need to tell people about your website and your offers. People will come to your website from many sources. The most common source is through the result page of a search engine, so position yourself carefully.

Q: How can I promote my website?

A: The cheapest way of promoting your website is to submit your URL (full Domain Name) to Search Engines and Directories, such as www.google.com and www.yahoo.com. You can do this manually by going to the Search Engines and looking for a page saying ’submit your URL’ or similar