21st century business demands 21st century performance. What this means for any type of business proprietor, big or small, is that your electronic appearance is just as important as your brick-and-mortar business and you must be able to accept all forms of payment online from prepaid credit cards to PayPal. In the best examples, if the electronic appearance is professional enough, you can entirely forego the need of a brick-and-mortar altogether. The key to this is a clean statement of intent, a unified appearance and a clear directive. In other words, you should be able to sum yourself up in a small enough space to fit between a ‘www.’ and a ‘dot com.’
This is where you encounter the need of creating a domain name, finding host servers, website designs and website-building software to help unify the process of ‘image creation.’ Most of the major websites you can go to buy an URL also offer their own server and website-building services, though some are more customizable than others.
If you want website control, use the domain purchasing and hosting service to hold your URL, but do the programming and design yourself. If you don’t know how, website software can help. If you don’t want to deal with that, then hire out to someone who can.
It also helps to be versed in web trends and terminology. The same principle applies to owning and managing a brick-and-mortar store. Strobe lights in the windows and loud, blaring, obnoxious music won’t do much to help you sell pet beds and cat litter. Something well-lit, quiet and functionally designed will attract customers, keep them in your store and put them enough at ease to trust your services and buy your products.
Websites work the same way, but if you aren’t in tune with current trends and you try your own hand at design, you might end up with strobe lights and loud, obnoxious music. Collaboration is the 21st century word to describe this, and also how you should prepare your website design.