Computers in Business :: Ireland's Leading Business IT Magazine

By Aisling Mackey

When I built my first website back in 2004, I was heavily pregnant, harried and exhausted, with limited time on my hands to get it all done. The task seemed insurmountable. E-shopping software, host providers, merchant gateways, pay-per-click: there was so much terminology and so little time.

The site was www.craftsupplies.ie, an online craft supplies shop, and I managed to launch it, albeit late, but with a lot of effort every step of the way. Six years on, my most recent shop site was written in a matter of days and cost me just €200 or €300 to build and launch.

I’ve learnt a lot in those six years, and I hope to pass some of this practical experience on to you in this article.

One of the great things about setting up online is the low cost of entry for a new business venture. For my book, Clickthrough, I interviewed six successful Irish online entrepreneurs. Some of them set up their first online shops for as little as €150, including stock! Online businesses are accessible to all.

Another great feature is the ease with which you can create a low cost online presence for your business with the potential to reach thousands, if not millions, of customers – worldwide.

The internet marketplace has huge potential, as you don’t just have local reach, you have global reach. The possibilities are endless if you do things right.

There are a number of steps you should consider when launching your own internet business. Before you start, consider the following six issues.

Starting out: if you’re starting out or even just looking for ideas, a good thing to do is to look at the various internet business models that are already working successfully. It’s not just about online shops and marketing brochure sites for businesses.

Consider the following models:

* online merchant selling tangible goods: this is the most common business model. CDWow.ie is a good example of this; revenue comes from direct online sales,

* online merchant selling virtual/ downloadable goods: eg selling online books or software that you download online. The website, www.statcounter.com, is an example of this; revenue comes from direct sales,

* online brochure for a business: part of the overall sales process * information portal: eg Weddings Online.ie – a portal with articles, shop, special offers, supplier directory and discussion forum, basically all you need to organise your wedding; revenue comes from advertising and shop, if present

* directory of products/services: an example is An Post’s new online shopping directory; revenue comes from suppliers advertising

* social portal: an example would be www.anotherfriend.com; revenue comes from online subscription

* blog: revenue can come from online advertising or spin-off products and

* selling a service online enabling appointments to be made.

Any one of these can make you money, so spread your wings when it comes to thinking of an idea and see what you can come up with.

Once you’ve got the idea, the next step is to acid-test it for the web. Has your idea got unique potential for the internet and is it suitable for selling or deploying on the worldwide web? The internet has the most potential as a marketplace in the world, but it also has the most competition.

Uniqueness is vital – whether that be the best price, best selection, best customer service or a unique product or offering, if you can find one. If you’ve asked (and answered) these questions, the next step is to consider whether your business idea is actually suitable for selling online.

Whatever your product – whether it be something tangible like a book or intangible like a service, information or downloadable good – ask yourself the following questions before taking it online.

* Is your product suitable to sell physically on the web; what are the shipping costs, or methods for selling it online?

* Does it display well in a browser?

* Do your target customers actually shop online?

Ok, so you’ve answered those three questions successfully and your idea is ready to go. Where to next?

When choosing a website name/ domain address, the temptation is to create another Pigsback.com or Daft.ie, but the reality is that there are not many sites out there with non-obvious names that people remember easily. Those that do are often heavily branded with big marketing budgets.

My recommendation is to stick to obvious names that explain what you do and are easy to remember. That way, you’re ahead of the pack already.

For any business with an Irish market, a ‘.ie’ domain address is what you want – ‘.coms’ are nearly all gone at this stage and are for businesses trading to an international audience.

Do a quick check at www.whoislookup.ie to see whether your desired name is available and, if it is, you’re onto the next stage of picking a host provider.

There are some requirements that must be fulfilled before you will be granted a .ie address; essentially, you must show that you have a right to the name you are registering. Go to www.iedr.ie for more information.

A host provider is a company that provides you with a place to store the information for your website, so that it is always available and able to be viewed by surfers browsing the web. Choosing one is something your developer may do for you, but if they don’t, make sure to shop around. A simple Google of ‘host provider’ will reveal a host (sorry) of providers.

Remember that registering your domain name gives you the right to own that website address, but it doesn’t automatically create space for the site on a computer somewhere in order for it to have content.

The next step after registration – sometimes done during registration – is to choose an internet host provider to host your website, keep it alive and make it available to people.

When choosing a host provider, you’ll find that many offer similar packages. Consider price, of course, but also make sure that your host provider provides good spam protection, decent statistics and, most important of all, good support. Ask around to see what your friends are using or who is spoken well of on online forums. I trust these kind of sources and it usually works out well.

This is obviously a very important part of the process .As an overview, here are some examples of ways you can get your site built:

* build the website yourself,

* hire a professional, local development house to build the site for you,

* hire an overseas website development house,

* purchase a reusable template off the shelf and pay to have it tailored and integrated,

* find a student/brother/friend with IT knowledge to develop your site for you or

* build using a basic website builder – software provided free on the internet or from your host provider.

It’s not possible to go into all of these in detail here, but for people with a technical ability and leaning, here’s some extra information.

Building yourself is worth considering.

All you need is knowledge and a good web editor, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver. You do need a decent amount of knowledge for it to be doable.

I have a 15-year-old degree in computer science, which still gave me enough foundation knowledge to be able to muddle through my first site myself.

The option to use an overseas web development house, from somewhere in India or Poland, is also a possibility if you can communicate what you need/want with a technical vocabulary and understanding of what’s being delivered.

This costs about €200 to €400 per site. A reusable template is also an option here. I used one of these for my www.budgetwedding.ie site. I purchased a template for $50 and then customised it to use it for a marketing brochure-style information site. It saved on graphic designer costs, which meant that I could really build the site on a budget.

Web development houses – local ones – generally give the most professional result, best support and most flexible approach to building a site – but at a price. Costs vary from €500 to €5,000, but an average marketing brochure-type site should be less than €1,000.This is fine if you have the budget for it, as no technical knowledge is required.

The last two options – using a friend/brother and building the site yourself using a website builder – are both good options when a truly professional finish isn’t required.

Friends/relatives often have the skills required and costs are lower, but deadlines are rarely met and it’s likely to be more limited in terms of options for the look and feel of the site.

Site builders are often free (such as Google’s) but your URL will often be hosted on the builder owner’s site (eg http://sites.google.com/aisling.mackey), or the builders themselves are limited in terms of functionality and layout. If you’re really at the start-out stage, these are worthwhile exploring for a first website.

There are several open source (ie free) shopping cart software packages available that can be used to build an online shop. Developer costs will still be high, ranging from as much as €5,000 up to €10,000 for an Irish software house to build it.

EBay and Amazon both have storefronts you can use to sell your wares, but this comes with a lot of competition and low-price expectations.

Open source, however, is good for testing out an online shop idea. Lastly, you will need some kind of online payment mechanism. PayPal is a good, if expensive, way to start and is easy to integrate into a website.

An account is no longer required to make a payment on PayPal. Merchant accounts and gateways offer better rates. but require more integration and can be added to your site further down the line.

The choice is yours, depending on budget and requirements.

When it comes to getting the word out there for your site, there are two golden rules: search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves the use of various techniques to improve a website’s ranking in the search engines and, thus, attract more visitors. In layman’s terms, this means altering the content and other aspects of your website to raise your place in the rankings of Google and other search engines when people search for keywords relevant to your business.

This includes ensuring that keywords you want to be listed for in search results are mentioned at least five times per page on your site, and that there are lots of links to and from your site and multimedia content. It’s a hard task to get to the top of the search results list and the rules from the search engines, such as Google, can change when you do.

For those less willing to slog at SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a good alternative. PPC advertising consists of adverts placed on search engine pages and content networks (sites such as blogs, portals and general web content) in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. It works on a number of different premises:

* only clicks on an advert are paid for, not impressions,

* advertisers choose a set of words they wish to bid on and

* advertisers set daily budgets for how much they’re willing to spend on clicks in a day.

Depending on what you and others are willing to pay for each click on a keyword, your listing will be slotted into the list of adverts in order.

Whoever is willing to pay the most to show up for the word ‘Arsenal’, for example, will be top of the list of ads.

We use GoogleAdwords PPC extensively for all of our sites and find it works very effectively.

We measure all our advertising and for us, nothing is as effective or gives value for money like Google Adwords. Google has the lion’s share of the search engine market.

That’s it! When I completed the interviews for the six online entrepreneurs for my book, I asked each of them whether they had any words of wisdom for would-be online entrepreneurs. Their answer?

‘‘Just do it! Lots of people talk about it. Just do it!”

After my own trials and tribulations through the years in the online world, I can only echo their words. Go on. You won’t regret it.

Aisling Mackey’s book, Clickthrough: A Practical Guide to Starting a Successful Internet Business, will be published in midFebruary by Oak Tree Press, at €15. You can pre-order your copy post-free at www.oaktreeepress.com