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The rapid emergence of the web as a strategic business vehicle has created a significant opportunity for many companies. Smart marketers are leveraging the power of the web as a new way of doing business. It is fast becoming the preferred information and commerce channel of the new economy, forcing companies to look beyond their traditional business processes.

The web is more than a function of marketing. It's a process, a tool, a medium, and an opportunity to provide customers with a favourable brand experience that helps build relationships and ultimately brand loyalty and repeat business.

Is your website just brochureware?

Brochureware refers to websites or webpages that are produced by taking a printed brochure and translating it directly to the web without regard for the potential opportunities offered by the new medium. The result is a static and uninteresting page or site that fails to take advantage of the web's interactive and dynamic capabilities to provide a brand experience, capture customer data or build customer relationships that drive the purchase intent.

At essentia^®, when we build your website, we discuss your search engine optimisation requirements with you. We believe that as one of the core components of online marketing, Search Engine Optimisation is a necessity for any business with a web presence. Search engines index more than three billion different web pages, all competing for visitors. Proper Search Engine Optimisation is the only way to ensure that your site will be found.

"It's not just about how it looks. It's about how you can leverage the power of this channel as a new way of doing business. To create significant opportunity, the design of your website should focus on user-centred objectives."

In the development of your site, here are some of the factors that we consider critical to the success of your site:

Design, look and feel
The look and feel of the site will represents your brand, it says a lot about your brand personality, what it stands for and what you believe in offering your customers. As such the logo, branding style and corporate imagery should be determined before work on the site commences. If you have existing corporate identity and style, these values would be reflected in the design of your site.

Content
While look and feel is important to attract prospects to your site, the content is critical. The content should be easy to understand, always current, engaging and relevant to your target market. The content needs to be relevant and tailored to the needs of your target market; it also should be presented in a manner that encourages enquiries or contact with your company. Links to relevant industry bodies and other useful information may add credibility to your site. Consider if this is appropriate to your business.

Navigation and usability
Our role is to develop a site that is easy to navigate, making sure that prospects do not abandon your site due to difficulties in navigating around the site to find information they are looking for. Pages should load fast so that users do not abandon your site for competitor sites. A site map may be included to help people find their way around the site and a search function might also be helpful.

User-centred objectives
It's not just about how it looks. To leverage the power of this channel, the design of a website should focus on user-centred objectives. Prospects who visit your site are possibly looking for indication or assurance that you have what they are looking for and that you're a reliable company to deal with. The copy should be pitched at them, written in a way that would lead them to make contact with your company. Making contact offers the opportunity to start engaging with a prospect which ultimately you want to convert to a sale.

Lead generation and acquisitions
The purpose of your site is not only to convey information but also to generate leads that you can follow up on with a more personalised one on one approach once the enquiry has been initiated. People who come to your site may possibly already have some degree of interest in your company or what you have to offer. The objective of your site is to get them to contact you so you can engage on a one-on-one basis to convert to a sale. At essentia^®, we design your site with this objective in mind.

Measurement & Analysis
Measuring the level of interest in your website through web trends and statistics, and analyzing the results can provide valuable decision-making information to help fine tune your website content according to user behaviour and preferences. By recognising particular areas of interest and profiling your users, you are better able to provide more relevant content in your future marketing efforts.

Launch of your website, integration and ongoing communications
Officially launching your website and telling people about it is essential to ensuring that your website has a good start! The essentia^® BlastOff! package is a service we offer our clients to assist in the launch of their website, plan for ongoing communications and marketing of the site, online and offline, using a combination of direct marketing and traditional marketing methods. Where appropriate we use a combination of advertising and promotions, direct marketing and channels such as email broadcasts or SMS broadcasts to communicate and drive traffic to your site.

Integration of all offline collateral materials with the website is important to ensure we maximise the opportunity to enhance and reinforce your brand. This is especially critical in building a strong presence in the minds of people looking for your type of product or service, ensuring that you continue to remain top of mind and occupy high share of mind in order to block out competition.

Search Engine Optimisation
Have a website, but no one's visiting? Promoting your website via search engine optimisation can significantly increase the number of visitors to your website and can yield an extremely high return on investment. Your website is the online face of your company. Building a good site gets you only part way there. You need to make sure people can find you. It goes without saying that promoting via search engine optimisation is one part of online promotion you do not want to neglect.

Other important matters:

Web Hosting
Choosing a Web hosting provider and a suitable hosting package is an important step to getting online. What or who you choose will depend on your proposed website requirements such as the amount of storage and bandwidth needed, number of email addresses, whether you have specific database requirements, need a dedicated server or want to transact online, whether you need extensive online technical support and so on. As part of developing your website, we will walk you through this process.

Domain Name Registration
Your domain name is your own address on the Internet. As no two parties may ever hold identical domain names, it is a unique identifier of you or your company. It is how your customers will remember you and find you among the millions of other web sites on the internet.

A unique domain name is your first step in joining the internet community. It's a quick and easy process to finding a domain name that is available. We'll then guide you through the other steps in the registration process.

Maintenance
Once your website is live, online, it requires regular maintenance. A website that is not frequently updated, is like a product past its use-by date. The content expires. What does your website offer to visitors who visit a second, third or fourth time?

It is important that your website is always kept new, interesting and relevant as it reflects the way people perceive the energy behind your company and its initiatives. To keep the site fresh, we can provide services in the form of a maintenance agreement to facilitate ease of updates to your site. This maintenance program will enable you to make changes to your website quickly at a moment's notice if you need to. Alternatively, you can pre-schedule new content to replace the old at pre-determined frequency. We undertake maintenance programs irrespective of whether the site is developed by us or otherwise.

Maintenance agreements comprise of pre-booked bulk time at a reduced rate. The number of hours that you buy is entirely up to you and is based on how much content you need, to keep the site fresh and interesting to your audience. Come and discuss this with us.

Web Standards
At essentia^® we subscribe to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards to lead your webpage to its fullest potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. As a result we deliver a site that is cost effective and cost efficient, an online presence that not only works faster and is easier to maintain, but also facilitate marketing efforts.

Short-Term Cost Savings
All things considered, an experienced designer adhering to a CSS / XHTML approach is likely to spend less development hours than one stuck on nesting tables. With one all-controlling style sheet, dramatic changes both aesthetic and structural can be made in minutes. A designer competent in CSS can also steer clear of complicated JavaScript hacks, potentially avoiding the need for hiring a second developer.

Long-Term Cost Savings
Using less code and images can easily cut bandwidth bills in half. Visual and structural changes can be made fast and efficiently with CSS. Using standards based process maintenance is simplified and fast and you are not necessarily locked into the original designer. Any knowledgeable developer can understand and alter code.

Marketing Advantages
Using standards enables rapid development, allowing you to launch your site quicker, and also update content quicker and easier. The ability for rapid site wide changes, swiftly adding new pages with new products, switching colour schemes to fit the latest trends or remove outdated or time-sensitive material is a competitive advantage.

User Advantages
With pages loading quicker and are more responsive, users are likely to spend more time on your site. The second a layout breaks or takes too long to render, the visitor could click to another site. This is especially relevant to the crowd still on high-speed connections whose attention spans have an incredibly short threshold. A standards-compliant site also enjoys wide cross browser and cross platform compatibility. It will render correctly in every modern browser on any platform. In addition, XHTML sites are not only future-friendly against upcoming browser versions, but can accommodate other devices, such as PDAs. Adopting a standards based process alleviates a huge number of accessibility problems present in non-standard sites, and is the first step toward meeting government guidelines for accessibility for disabled users. This is a peripheral benefit that bears no additional costs.