| Don’t be afraid to redesign
The lifespan of a Web site is measured in “dog years.”
Like it or not, they get stale pretty quickly. Plan on redoing or at least modifying regularly. Update regularly.
Remember immediacy in the short term, too
People on the Internet are increasingly habituated to instant gratification. If you’re selling a product, you should accept credit cards, either in real-time or offline ASAP.
Respond to inquiries quickly. Set up a schedule.
Other tips & tricks, in no particular order:
Register a domain today. In fact, register several.
If nothing else, owning a domain will allow you to avoid EVER CHANGING YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS AGAIN!
Instead of joe@hotspot.com (which you’ll change in a year to joe@hotdot.com) you will be joe@workshop.com. You’ll own that. Even if you change providers, you carry that address with you for as long as you own it.
As more of your business involves e-mail, this is going to become a major factor, if it has not already.
Businesses are starting to conduct business by e-mail as much as by fax and phone. If your address is a “moving target” you are very apt to lose business.
Owning a domain costs $35 a year and will soon be as fundamental as your phone number in the yellow pages. Consider one for consumer services, workshop services and/or products, even if you don’t operate complete Web sites for each address.
Gain control of your e-mail
E-mail and especially spam are a pain, but they’re not the big deal many make them out to be. Do the following:
Budget 15 minutes each morning and in the afternoon to sort e-mail.
Run through all new e-mail and immediately trash obvious junk mail. You KNOW what that is!
Create some organization as allowed by your e-mail program. Create separate “mailboxes” or folders for separate customers, that kind of thing. You might even be able to create “filters” that automate some of this process
If you “don’t have time for this,” consider whether you have time to spend 10-20 minutes on the phone in place of EACH of those e-mail messages.
Companies and individuals are using the e-mail instead of the phone and instead of the fax, more every day.
Budget for marketing
Not just money, but time.
Not just the Web, but all forms of marketing.
To often, the “dirty work” is allowed to slip. But this usually means a lost of product and service promotion on one end, and follow-up on the other. And these are the two things that often result in new sales.
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