Suppouse you should plan corporative site in the Internet for your company. Volume of financing, plan of actions, and success of the project depend of quality of your current preparing work. I hope some ideas of this article will be userful for your.

Corporative web site in the Internet. Review for a manager

Today the Internet became new area for activity of state organizations and private companies. It is not simply idle interest. Well composed informative official corporative page in the Internet creates good impression for the company, gives favorable comditions for important negotiations, create desirable impression about your company. Corporative site help to find new partner, estimate area of his interests, immediatly exchange commertial information. At last, there are your potential clients among millions Internet visitors. So the Internet is a huge wilderness area for advertisement activity. Now an usual official corporative site in the Internet unclude:

a list of services, catalog of goods, current price list
contact information for potential clients: phones, fax, e-mail addresses.
post address, detail map for office location.

Some corporative sites also includes history about the company, information about participation in various specialized exhibitions. So own representation in the Internet is useful in every respect.

To create site you should learn HTML and JavaScript, draw or scan all necessary pictures, make up all pages. In middle and small companies it is usually duty of local service engineer or system administrator. But it is not right decision. Ordinary it needs some weeks or mounth to select a site structure, search and spell all included texts, determine common style of the site.

You write a number of materials, insert visitors counter in the first page, and publish them in the Internet. When month later you check this counter, you are suprise its small value. Most registered visitors are you local engineer and system administrator. Nonexperienced developers often forget the Internet have own rules. you should know them, if you wand to have success.

Today everybody can buy computer and open own newspaper or journal. But how many readers will have your journal? The same problem have any site in the Internet. It is necessary appropiate announce the set of pages (site), to attract attention of the reader first time, to interest him, to motivate him to return here once again for a new material. Such kind of activity around a site (promotion) are absolutely necessary. The creation of an initial set of pages is only beginning of your long way in the Internet: many months and even years - for example, look dates in Copyright records in any popular site.

Search engines and theme collections

Lets find some company in Saratov sity, which trades building materials. Universal index servers are the best method to search some information in the Internet. For example, we open popular Russian server Rambler ( Stack Ltd. http://www.rambler.ru) and give command from two words "slate", and "Saratov". Few seconds later we recieve a list of addresses of Internet pages. First item in the list correspond to site of a trade house "Arcon". Hence, as a manager, you should have all efforts to include (register) your site in such systems of global search and indexing. Owner of appropriate search server are also interested in a registration of your site. Moreover, some servers daily look new sites in the Internet, and automatically register them. If your site are located in a successful place, there is probability for its automatically registration during several next months. (Such smart server specialists call "spider").

Other way to your pages - some collection of links in any independentl site, whose authors have found your site to a worthy mention. There are little links in such collections usually, but they are selected much more careful and they are accompanied with the description made by the professional. Find such sources on your theme in the Internet and in personal correspondence try to convince their authors to bring there in information about your site.

Any case you should self write the summary on your site and choose appropriate key words for it description. Other words, on the head of very first page of your site in tag META you should give the brief announcement for your site. For example:

Beside in the same tag specify key words. With this words any visitor in the Internet cat find your site by means public search servers:

Unfortunately, beginning site developers frequently forget to make such simple thing.

Banners

Banner is a small, usually animated picture, located on any page of other organization or company. Purpose of the banner is to attract attention of accidental visitor to induce your site. In fact the banner carries out the same role, as publicity board on a high-speed highway. Obviously, the more people sees the page, where yours banner is established, the more visitors you wait on your site.

It is obvious, outsider banner distract attention of you own readers. So mutual banner exchange are often practises. It is effective for sites that have common themes and an approximately identical attendance. In this case both sites obtain some profit. Any reader study pages on first site, than pay attention on your banner and became interested in other materials from the Internet, devoted to the same theme. But if your site is just start, and you want quickly involve in it first thousands of visitors, it is possible to place your banner on any large, frequently visited public site. Let's notice however, that in this case you should pay for this service. The incomes of display another's banners are an significant part of the budget of many commercial sites with tens and hundred thousand visitors within one day.

The basic criterion of attendance of your site are the indications of a visits counter on its first page. Counter indications determine expediency of accommodation there your banner. Unfortunatelly owner of other site can correct his counter indications at any moment. Therefore, stipulating conditions of banner accommodation, you should require that partner's site include an counter of by third independent company. For example it may be counter of the Stack Ltd. company, whose counters can be met now on many Russian sites.

Static site is died site

Suppose, you register your site on public search servers and place your banners in a number of other sites. So you have ensured regular inflow of new readers. The following important task is to make casually come visitor in habitue of your site. Other words, after first acquaintance with yours site reader should return here again day or two later to look novelties. Habitues not casual visitors are the main readers of on successfully functioning сайте. So lets try to formulate some basic rules for developers of successfull corporative sites.

1. It is better to publish slightly, but regular. Just some time you leave your site without new receipts, the majority of your constant readers will be lost. You should publish new materials some times per week, better per day. You should announce all changes and updatings in your site on the first page. Near each such announcement there should be a date of its occurrence. So reader could at once see, which new materials have appeared or were updated during his absence.

2. The support of working representation is a continuous search of new themes, new structure of the site, more perfect style. The majority of successfull sites in the Internet completely change them style and structure of approximately time per one year. An initial pulse for this search should be an analysis of attendance of separate site sections. Fortunately modern servers include all necessary tools for this purpose. It is necessary to develop sections with good attendance, to fill up them with the new publications, subsections. And vice versa, less successful sections you should liquidate or essentially reconstract. Certainly, psychologically it is very heavy to accept the miscalculations admitted in a designing period, to realize their reasons, to decide on radical alteration or even liquidation of the unsuccessful unit with lost of previous tremendous forces and time. Much more comfortable do not any efforts, nothing undertake. Unfortunately, many Internet developers don't wish constantly search and find new points of contacts with an audience, and don't wish to go on the certain victims.

3. You should transform visitors of your site into your co-authors. The highest skill of the site developer consists of waking interest in the audience to discuss questions from already published materials and so obtain material for next publications.

The simplest way of communication with your readers is an correspondence via electronic mail. You can accommodate in the first page of your site an invitation to leave any response about current publications ("visitors' book"). At the end of every page with analytical material you can invite reader to state his own opinion on the mentioned question. Do not forget , the professional etiquette demands you should answer to the author of a every response, or publish his message on pages of your site. Regularly spent questionnaire of your readers and publish assembled data.

Some site owners organize special pages for an open free discussion of something interesting questions (debatable club, chat). It is an interesting idea. But its successful realization require the large preparing work, a high level attendance in your site. It is necessary to select such questions, which would be interesting to the majority of the visitors. Questions of professional interest are twice difficalt problem. Unfortunately an automatic publication all messages without any exception is not a right decision. It is necessary to eliminate some materials. But time of a delay in publication of other arrived messages should not exceed hour - two.

4. If you have not an opportunity to publish new materials each day, it is very desirable to organize in your site any hot news line. Here I will place daily both common messages and some professional reviews. Other worls, you find in the Internet some special interest information and submitting its in more precise, distinct, and structured style. You carry out a reviewer function and collect together and systematize the information, scattered over the Internet.

Some more advices

5. It is wrong decision to limit your site only by an information about your company. Try to represent wide area of professional themes. Analytical materials, general tendencies in your business, silutions of your own experts - all this create favorable image for your site, represent you as a serious responsible partner. Eventually, from two identical sites visitors always prefer one those authors occur advansed above trivial self-advertisement, where they can find really valuable and useful materials.

6. Usually transfer of the graphic image occur as long as transfer of many tens text pages. For this reason you should use the Word, not the Image to dialogue with the visitor (some special sites make exception of this common rule). Some young developers occur under an illness wish to have "cool" graphic site and ignore a fact that the total size of some their pages may exceed many hundreds kilobytes, and time of transfer will exceed few minutes (in conditions of the Russian networks). You should create not so beautiful site, but more practical, with more information in fast pages. A large amount of useful business materials, simple and interesting writting style, the well thought over structure of sections, regular updating is an attribute of good site, not external shine.

7. At last, corporate pages in the Internet represent some kind of mass media, same as TV, journals, and newspapers. You find here the same rules and methods of creation of the desired image. Despite of all external distinction of these areas, try to find around successful ideas and use them in the wild area of the Internet.

You see, even small corporative site in the Internet actually requires hard work and careful long-term planning.

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