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TRUE or FALSE: I have a web site now let the sales roll in!

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What to expect from a business web site.

FALSE!

As web developers one of the most common things we hear is, "I have had this site for a year {or more} but have received only {xx number} calls from it. Why should I keep it?"

Tim Berners-Lee talking at the World Wide Web Foundation press conference at the Newseum in 2008.John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee-Knight-crop, CC BY-SA 2.0 Tim Berners-Lee talking at the World Wide Web Foundation press conference at the Newseum in 2008.John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee-Knight-crop, CC BY-SA 2.0 - TRUE or FALSE: I have a web site now let the sales roll in! - What to expect from a business web site.

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Tim Berners-Lee talking at the World Wide Web Foundation press conference at the Newseum in 2008.
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee-Knight-crop, CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the most common fallacies concerning having a site is that once it is set up it needs no more attention, but a web site is NOT something that will function on its own with no continuing effort. Much like raising a child, without nurturing, teaching and positive reinforcement it will languish and eventually die. Whether a person has children or not we all know it is within our human nature to help them flourish.

If it takes so much work, why have a web site?

There are a few things with a web site that is identical to this process of raising children but first I'd like to address, "If it takes so much work, why have a web site?" The simple answer is efficiency! A web site for a small business does not take much attention at all to be able to reach your potential clients, we have seen clients spend as little as five minutes a week working SMART on their web site with better results on the web than 90 percent of the competition!

One of our biggest goals with Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.'s Web SPeED is to simplify and even automate as much of the regular attention a site needs to continue to appear an active and useful site to Google and other search engines. This is, after all, the very thing that search engines strive for and have done so since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

Shortly after that date the very first search engine, Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. Starting out as a simple index of the contents of the World Wide Web it consisted of the same three parts as search engines today:

A Spider that automatically searches and indexes the content of web sites.
A Database that stores that index/information.
A User interface that you and I {the users} see and from which we receive results.

If we were simply given any and every result that matches our search we would literally see billions of search results, most of which would contain outdated content.

Search Engine Spiders are designed to find fresh and updated content!

If search engines did not find fresh sites we would find thousand, even millions of pages from companies that may not even exist! We have to realize that these search engines do not have the ability to go out and visit you in real life to confirm your business is still there, so activity on your site is the way they KNOW you are still there! Fresh and Updated content is how we talk to the internet and search engines!

The Archie Search Engine was the first one written in 1990 by Alan Emtage. The Archie Search Engine was the first one written in 1990 by Alan Emtage. - TRUE or FALSE: I have a web site now let the sales roll in! - What to expect from a business web site.

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The Archie Search Engine was the first one written in 1990 by Alan Emtage.

With billions of web sites containing hundreds of billions of web pages it is estimated that less than ten percent ( 10% ) {and that is VERY generous} are even relevant to anything today. The sole goal of any search engine is to find those few sites that are really worth looking at!

What this means for YOU as a BUSINESS with a Web Site on the World Wide Web

All this information is included here to illustrate that activity on your business's web site is crucially important! A web site that receives no fresh or updated content will quickly languish. In a few months a web site will fall far below what any user will see and in a year a site may become impossible to find except for the MOST specific searches.

We have seen sites that have sat completely untouched for years that cannot even be found even with a specific search for a unique company name!

That sounds like so much work! Can I really do that?

This, of course, is something most people will ask themselves but the absolute answer is

YES! You can do it!

First off, keep human nature in mind, we all know that over 90% of people out there are very lazy!

{Oh David, that is a mean thing to say!}

Yeah, at first glance it may seem mean but far more than 90% of people out there will never go so far as to start a business and get a web site! Even if you just came across this article while doing a little research EVERY reader here is easily in the upper 10% so, GOOD JOB to YOU!

That brings us back to Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.'s Web SPeED which is designed to be a simple-to-use web site content management system (CMS). That is just a web term for Somewhere you can log in on the Internet to change and update your web site.

This kind of thing scares off a lot of people (back to that 90%) but if you have:

ever sent an email,
have ANY social media pages,
ever shopped online,
paid a bill online or
ever used a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc, etc

then you have all the skills required to operate Web SPeED.

We have hosted hundreds of web sites over the last two decades and the biggest tool to using Web SPeED successfully is just to simply Do It!! Log in to your account, click around and see where things are. One of the primary rules we follow while developing Web SPeED is that if you have access to it YOU CAN USE IT! There is nothing in your account that you cannot read and understand if you go in, relax and read what is there.

There are things that may happen while you are there but there is nothing that will blow up the world! ;) {much less your web site.} Our business is here to help when you need it, but we can only help if you ask!

So what kind of things do I need to do as a Web Site Owner?

First and foremost, what would you do if someone walked in to your shop, showroom or even home looking for information on your business's products and/or services? You would talk about it. Simple as that! If a potential client calls on the phone you may answer questions or tell them

Any successful business owner has plenty to talk about! Any successful business owner has plenty to talk about! - TRUE or FALSE: I have a web site now let the sales roll in! - What to expect from a business web site.

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Any successful business owner has plenty to talk about!

where to see your display at a store front or a trade show of some kind. You might show pictures of a product being created but not by just anyone, BY YOU!

These are the very things you should be putting on your web site and social media pages at every opportunity. Every time you build another product or make another delivery you create history to your business. Nearly every time you talk to potential clients on the phone you are saying things that every client wants to know. Simply listen to yourself and ask yourself, "Is that information on my web site? Well it should be!"

Do It, Do It Regularly and create habits of success!

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who has used Web SPeED successfully for their site has done so by just Doing it! Yes, it may sound cliche, it may sound like something out of a Guide to success written in the last century but this is being used for centuries, to this day and will continue to be used for any foreseeable future! So often people spend so much time looking for the next big key to success but never do anything because Do It just sounds like a cliche. You know what? It is cliche but if we don't just Do It nothing will ever get done.

Conclusion

And now we come down to it, a simple change or update on a web site lets the search engines know you are still here! You are still answering questions and you are still selling your products and/or services. That means you can never fall into the lie that a web site is DONE! That is not the state in which any web site should arrive.

One thing I always told my kids growing up is the day you stop learning is the day you die. Even today at my youthful age of 51 I learn every day. It may just be as simple as I learned how to live with a new ache and pain, but I learned! If you ever watch or read news, you do it to learn. If you look up a weather forecast you did it to learn.

Well, your web site is the same. If it no longer gets new attention it will die. Oddly enough, as stated at the beginning it does not take that much time, either. If one makes a practice of doing it regularly and on a weekly basis a web site owner will learn it and remember it.

Where did Web SPeED get its start?

This is my favorite story, it began in 1999 when two elderly women wanted to do something on their computers, both in their 80s and both with little knowledge and a LOT of fear of computers! We were tasked with the job of creating a system that they could use with minimal training. All it required was to go do it on a regular basis and both did so. One did it nearly every day and the other did it once a week or two but BOTH were successful!

We use the same practices to this very day to create a simplified system that only requires one to Do It!

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