A good website is as necessary today as a business card. Many people don't even bother with phone books when they want something, they go straight to the web. Can your future customers and clients find you there, quickly and easily? Can they find what they want on your site?

Your first question is: what kind of site do you need and what do you want it to do for you?

The Online Brochure

A website that exists to tell people about a business or service, that is mainly informative and intended to drive traffic to a physical business, performs like a digital brochure. This kind of site is very suitable to a business that provides a service or will otherwise not be selling goods over the internet, such as a medical service provider, a restaurant or club or recreation provider, consumer or home services provider or other business that provides services on site.

A brochure site requires at least graphics and copy to tell and show your visitors what you're about. It can also include animation, video and sound and visitor interactive features such as polls, surveys, a contact form visitors fill out which provides contact information for people who expressed interest in your product. To have a brochure site you need the site itself designed and built, a server (a computer that will hold the files for your site and receive incoming requests from other computers to view the site) or a hosting company which rents you server space for a monthly fee and a domain name or the site address that is typed in, "yourwebsite".com.

There are many good hosting services on the internet. We use and recommend geekoids.com.

The Online Store

An online store is exactly what it sounds like: a website to sell products by mail, just like a store. To sell products online, you'll need all of the above plus a method to display products and receive orders and payment. This can vary from extremely simple to a full online catalog with shopping cart and merchant services account, depending on your business.

The Online Community

An online community forms around a common interest, product, industry, issue or anything else that might draw people together - cultural heritage, motorcycles, music, dogs, political beliefs, etc, pretty much limitless. Depending on the purpose of the community, it could include many different features and functions for its users. To name just a few examples, these could include profile pages, discussion forums, member chat and file and video upload.

The Online Publicity Kit

An online publicity kit is sort of an interactive brochure for artists. It can include images, video and audio samples, contact and booking information, etc.