User Guides > How do I get my business online?
Most businesses can benefit from the range of technologies that make up the Internet.
The Internet can help you to:
- improve your productivity
- communicate more effectively - both internally and with customers and suppliers
- boost your profile
- sell online
Increasingly businesses are integrating their online activities with their existing administrative systems to increase their efficiency and improve their customer service.
The basic steps to setting up a company website:
- Decide what you want to get from your website and the Internet as a whole. Always focus on your site's target audience.
- Prepare a specification and brief for the site. Decide what key content you want to include - product information and your contact details are a must - and the image you want the design to get across.
- Decide whether you're going to create your website yourself or get a professional web designer to design and build it for you. This will depend on your in-house skills and how complicated the site is.
- If you're going to use one, choose a designer with experience of the type of site and technologies you want.
- Build your site.
- Decide who will "host" your site - put your pages up on the Internet.
- Choose and register your website address.
- Test the site before you launch it, looking at it from the user's point of view, for example, make sure all of the links work.
- Market the site to attract visitors. Registering on search engines is an important first step.
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