Home Office Mall

Company Image: First of all, amateur web sites are exactly that, and they're readily identifiable in the online world as such. The drawbacks to do-it-yourself sites are;

You stand to lose a valuable customer if the appearance you project is less than professional. "Build-your-own-homepage" kits make your company look as if;

• You operate out of your garage or
• Your company doesn't care enough to do things right.

Cost: Madison Avenue type firms will charge a small fortune to create your site. - Example: Net Marketing's Web Price Index. If your company has money to burn, go ahead. But a realistic range is from $500. to $2500. for clean, well-executed, multi-page small to medium business sites, including scans. In some cases the lower price will even including hosting for the first year. If you just need a one-page presence, which introduces your company and briefly covers your products or services, often you can have exactly that done for under $100. The following comparison is from an industrial site, Pallet-Mall, and shows a comparison between company charges.

More sophisticated features on a web page: Here you're in a whole different ball game. Custom features such as sophisticated search engines (do you really need one?), an online newsgroup (ditto) or flamboyant graphics (a full 30% of online users turn their graphics capability off in order to speed access to information) can up your price considerably. For things like secure shopping features, etc., you can figure on spending a fair amount more.

The web represents the single most valuable tool for product selection that anyone on this earth has ever seen. In the blink of an eye, your market area has just gone from your neighborhood to your World. At warp speed. The future is upon us.

Look at the size of your business in relation to the amount of advertising you do now, and plan accordingly. If you take full page ads in in trade magazines or you advertise at all in national magazines, take a look at what you'd spend on perhaps one or two inserts and spend the same amount on getting your web site up to snuff.

Accepting Credit Cards Online - The majority of companies offering credit card packages online are not doing you any great favor. What they're offering you is cheap shopping cart software in return for tacking an additional 1% onto what you're already paying your existing credit card processor for each and every sale. This is no bargain, particularly if you're already paying 2%.

A better alternative may be, (depending on the product or service you sell, or amount of membership dues your Club or Association could collect online), to elect a slightly higher upfront cost for the software. You can lease/purchase paying first and last month in advance and have a $1 buyout at the end of two years. Along with this you will pay a flat, per-item charge. This translates into $1.50 per transaction instead of 1% of the sale .

Do the numbers: If your company sells, say... 20 executive widgets or processes 20 widget-club annual membership dues per month, and your revenue is $12,000, you have the choice of paying either 1% ($120) or $1.50 per transaction ($30).

The type of business you do will determine the best choice for your firm. For smaller sales, you would build the $1.50/transaction fee into your shipping and handling charge. If you sell really small, inexpensive items, you might try to negotiate a hybrid program.

Need a recommendation? Drop us a line telling us what sort of commerce you're visualizing and we'll be happy to point you in the right direction.

E-Mail: Having a web page without your own DIRECT e-mail address (one that your company answers itself), is akin to paying for an ad in the yellow pages but refusing to install a telephone. (i.e.- Your company is immediately identified as clueless.)

Domain Names: In all cases, we recommend that you establish your own domain name. This exercise is much like registering your corporation name, in that if the name you have selected is currently available, you will need to register it with the appropriate governing body. In this case, the governing body is called InterNIC. What does it cost to do this? The professional who creates your web page will generally include their work to register your domain name as part of their site preparation package. InterNIC itself will charge you the sum of $70. (as of early 1998) which represents the first two years domain maintenance fee. Think of it as a virtual real estate tax.

Now.. about that domain name selection. We suggest that you try to make it easy on your customers/clients. First, try using your business name. Say you were looking for Xerox. If you ran a search using Xerox as your query, you'd probably find around six thousand pages with the word Xerox in them. On the other hand, if you simply took a chance and typed in http://www.xerox.com, bingo! you've found what you're looking for. Most people will try exactly that. Use your company's name or an easy-to-remember version of it.

If you're new to the web, you'll have noticed that websites have different URL (Uniform Resource Locator or "address") extensions. The "dot-com" at the end of the Xerox site, is actually an abbreviation of COMmercial. EDU is for an educational institution, GOV is for a government site, ORG is typically for a professional Organization, and so on and so forth. Because the automatic tendency is to type "dot-com" (.com), a number of professional ORGanizations and associations have opted for this extension in lieu of "dot-org". (.org)

How do you know if the domain name you'd like to use is available? First, decide on the name, then add a ".com" to the end of it. Keep it simple. By the way, if it's a multi-word domain you want, look very carefully at how it reads before running the words together. For instance, if you were to have a Florida Keys site, and abbreviated the word Florida, instead of people identifying your site as relating to the Florida Keys, what they'll read is "flakeys.com. So unless the owner of that site is selling puff pastry in the Keys, it's probably not the image that was intended to be conveyed.

What happens if the name has already been registered by someone else? Get creative. Try a variation. Something your customers will remember. (No, you may not register somebody else's trademark, so "budweiser.com" is definitely out).

Why would you need to spend the money on your own domain? Here's why. Have you ever typed in a URL only to find a sign saying something like "this site moved"?. Or have you lost a site entirely because the the link no longer goes anywhere? That's because the owner of the site didn't have his own domain name. OfficeMax was a prime example. We figured they hadn't gone out of business, because we saw their physical locations were still up and running, but sometime back during the summer of 1996, thousands upon thousands of web links to OfficeMax went dead, because they moved their web site without leaving a forwarding address. And NOBODY could figure out where they moved. Yes, we tried every combination we could think of, even posted a notice asking if anybody else had found it, to no avail. They were offline for months and months. If they'd had the good sense to register their own domain to begin with, they wouldn't have lost all that business. Your company, on the other hand, can plan ahead.

MONTHLY VIRTUAL DOMAIN COSTS: Next, you'll need to decide if you need a free-standing domain. What does this mean? Bottom line, about $50. a month to the Internet Service Provider. Add $35. for initial set-up. When does a free-standing domain make sense? When you think you'll have a fairly good sized site, and you anticipate making a lot of changes.

PARKED DOMAINS: Is there anything cheaper than a Virtual Domain? Sure. You'll opt for what is called a "Parked" domain. That's when you have your own domain name but you add a simple identifying extension to the end of it.

For example: If your company name were Franks Widgets, and you had registered a domain name entitled "http://www.widgets.com", you could use THIS version "http://www.widgets.com/franks" and save yourself about $25. a month.

If you decided to change the company who hosted your web site you would simply make certain that your new provider kept the same "/franks" extension and you wouldn't lose a single visitor due to your relocation.

What's the downside to parked domains? - If someone simply types in "http://www.widgets.com" without the "/franks" part, they'll land at your hosts page instead of yours. You've effectively given them the address of an office building but not the suite number. As long as there's an visible directory which will allow visitors to find you from the "lobby", you're fine. If there's not, you might want to rethink the location.

The moral being, the Parked Domain makes perfectly good sense if somebody can find you reasonably easily from the first page of your host's site. Thus, if you sell Widgets, don't select a host whose own page specializes in say.... "Software for Designing Store Fixtures", unless of course, they have a section clearly labled "The Widget Department" and your company is listed there.

MAGNET SITES - What are the chances of someone finding a single company's site on the web? Slim. Which is why companies choose to be located on "magnet" sites, well-laid-out heavily traveled web-sites, which tend to draw your ideal potential customer.

Think of it like a real world shopping center. If a woman goes to the mall to purchase a dress, chances are, she'll also be willing to consider buying a pair of matching shoes. So..where you see a dress shop, you'll likely see a similar quality shoe shop, because the second retailer believes his products will compliment the merchandise offered by his neighbor. If the shopper is going to spend a couple of hours in the mall, the lack of a car won't inconvenience her, thus you'll have noticed automotive service centers have cropped up in the center's parking lot. That's because the third retailer has identified the fact that it's a convenient time and place for a shopper to have the oil changed or the tires rotated.

Conversely, you'll rarely see an Engineer's office where they sell dresses, because the purpose of the primary site is different.

The same "magnet" logic holds true for professional centers. Which is why you often see Banks, coffee-shops and Federal Express locations on the ground floor of a high-rise office building. Each derives a specific benefit from the others presence. It would make little sense to have a dress-shop on the premises, because the primary purpose of the site is business, (no leisure time available to try on clothing.) The coffee shop, on the other hand, may represent a matter of convenience and expediency to the site's inhabitants.

What does all this boil down to? Unless your product or service meshes well with surfboards, flowers, coffee-beans, and glow-in-the-dark paintings of Elvis on black velvet, you might want to be a little more selective about where you choose to site your online business.

What will it cost to site your domain on a "magnet" site? Costs can vary wildly, often for no readily discernable reason. For example, Prodigy's Telecommuting/Work at Home Interest Group Home Page is a small single-purpose magnet site which offers a Banner ad for $700 per month, or a Text ad giving your URL for $300 per month. The IBM/IndustryNet alliance opened with grandiose plans to charge a staggering $2500. a month for a spot on what we consider to be one of the all-time least user friendly sites on the web. Predictably, they eventually filed Chapter 11.

If the magnet site is a good one, it will encourage repeat visits. If it's a great one, with a high concentration of similar sites, or if it has an "anchor" site which gets large amounts of outside publicity, the traffic to your own site is greatly increased.

Getting on a Magnet Site for free - If you like what you see in a particular "Mall" site, and you think you can derive additional business from having your own company there as well, talk to the webmaster about creating your company's web page. The more forward thinking of webmasters will site you there for free to thank you for your business.

More on the costs to create your web site - A little bit of online homework will show you that again, costs vary wildly, ranging from modest to truly absurd.

We'd say that today the average runs between $50. to $75/hr. (plus direct costs, such as scans, original artwork, consultants, and the like), although we've seen them run as high as $150/hr. A very reasonable price is $25/hr with scans included at no charge. If your scans require manipulation you'll simply be charged on an hourly basis.

A final word on selection - As noted, a preponderance of web sites are created by moonlighting "techies", amazingly talented programmers, most of whom, unfortunately, can't spell CAT, but without whose expertise this incredible medium wouldn't exist. Try to find the best of both worlds--a company who has talented writers as well as highly skilled programmers, at your disposal. If the college kid next door has a nifty new do-it-yourself site-building program and says he can do your web site for you for pocket change, hey, go for it. Assuming you've got money to burn that is. Because chances are you're going to have to build your site twice. First with the college kid. Second with the company you have to hire to go in and build it RIGHT the second time. ( We're asked to go in and rebuild a LOT of these.) Here's a word to the wise. Do it right the first time. It's a lot cheaper.

Most companies who identify that a web presence makes good sense would do just as well to start small and get the lay of the land before embarking on construction of a full-scale web site. If a QuikSite™ (the equivalent of, say, a half page of type-written data) is laid out properly, it can easily be expanded as the need arises. The point is to get your company online and get your customers familiar with your address. Once that's done, you can proceed at your own pace.

There are an abundance of magnet sites and web creators for you to choose from. Home Office Mall is but one of them.

About Home Office Mall - A magnet site, Home Office Mall is geared towards business professionals. The anchor for Home Office Mall is The OFFICE™, the website of a business product which generates ongoing publicity. The OFFICE™ has appeared in articles in more 80 newspapers, books, and magazines nationwide and was featured Live on the NBC TODAY Show as well as appearing twice on the nationally syndicated TV show, "Your New House". Home Office Mall itself was a featured site in Ziff-Davis InternetLife Best of The Web, and is recipient of multiple Best of the Web awards.

Home Office Mall offers affordable Web Sites for Business Professionals. Good Product,- Good Value. Reasonable Commercial Web Page Creation, with Personalized Service. Creative, functional, and literate web pages, created for your company in-house, by an independent team of writers, graphic artists, recording artists, announcers, and technical professionals. Pricing is practical: $25/hr. Our professionals can interpret your entire concept from scratch using a single idea or, we can design the site according to your specifications. We have created categories designed to function as magnet-sites within the primary magnet site, thus your firm will benefit from traffic to each of the other professional locations within Home Office Mall. We invite you to call 561-219-0455 or e-mail us with any questions you might still have.

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