Businesses can benefit from a web presence. Even the smallest business can use a "business card" website. Planning your webpage for profits - both now and in the future is the trick.

First you should look at your budget. What percent of revenues or what dollar amount per year have you budgeted for advertising and/or marketing? Considering a website can be much less expensive than many other forms of advertising, and that a website can produce a higher profit margin than many other forms of advertising you almost certainly have to have a webpage.

For most small, local and regional businesses, the only form of advertising that might take a higher priority in your budget would be a telephone listing in the Yellow Pages directory. White Page listings may be free in your area with a business account.

Are your customers younger, urban, professional, technical, or students? All of these tend to be highly net-literate and net-focused. Yes to any of these questions means a website is essential.

Can your products/services be shipped or transmitted easily? If so you can gear your webpage to national and international business. Multilingual websites or texts are necessary in some areas.

Do you have many small transactions or fewer but larger transactions in your commerce? This may direct you in deciding whether you want an ecommerce style "shopping cart" and "credit card acceptance" built into your website.

Are you selling in a specialized niche or collectible area with antique, original, or even rare pieces of merchandise? If you need enhanced communication for high-ticket items then an ecommerce page is less important than rapid and expert communication with clients or potential buyers.

Do your sales depend on cultivating customer relationships or are they for the quick resupply of mass produced stock? This will factor into the amount of time a buyer should be held within your webpage - or be quickly processed through your webpage.

The assets vs. costs of a webpage are important when you want to pay for the design of a webpage. You can create a blog, or photo site, or webpage free of charge if your budget is nil or your market has zero needs for website amenities. You can also create an expensive but more effective website if necessary.

The design of the webpage must focus on: Content (clear descriptions and excellent photos of your products/services) Layout (arrangement of elements in the webpage is easy to understand and pleasant to see) and Functionality (the webpage is easily operated by the visitor to effectively and quickly communicate your messages).

Ideally, your webpage loads in 4 seconds or less, looks immediately interesting, invites the visitor to check out his/her interests in your site, gives info quickly and esthetically, anticipates the lack of web-savvy in many visitors, makes the visitor feel that transactions are easy and safe.

From a technical point-of-view your website should: look good in all browsers, be easily edited or expanded for product changes and be easily found by search engines.

Once your website is on line you want to increase the number of people/customers coming to visit the site. Begin by printing your website address on all cards, stationery, vehicles and signboards that you print. Telephone directories and newspaper ads should also show your web address.

You can list your website with directories, many of which are free, especially the market-related directories that are most visited by your potential customers. You can contract for pay-per-click listings to get exposure from various online sources.

You can exchange links with related websites. You can bargain to place small banner ads in various websites related to your business. After a short time you will select the most productive places for advertising your business webpage. You don't have to commit large amounts of money to run these experiments in traffic generation.

About the author:

Arthur Browning began his career teaching technical writing in a small Midwestern university for 15 years. He later edited and published a national professional journal for some ten years. He is now an investor. His interests include art collecting, web marketing, writing.

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