Project 2 : BUSINESS WEBSITE
In this 2nd project you will be adding Javascript and Flash elements to create your very own (real or pretend) web business! Share your hobby or interest in the market place, e.g. art work, collectable items, child care or social services, a unique product, or custom work.

SEE EXAMPLE SITE HERE!

Your site requirements:
  • A minimum of 5 FULL PAGES including:

    page 1 : paragraph explaining your services, animated FLASH graphic logo
    page 2 : business history paragraph and mission statement
    page 3 : gallery of 5 or more products/service options with descriptions
    page 4 : Javascript order form of all product/service options
    page 5 : multiple contact options, e.g. email, form, address, phone, map
  • Graphical menu on all pages
  • Variety of text styles
  • Appropriate graphics positioned well on all pages
  • Most features covered so far
  • A unified site layout/theme
  • User friendliness
  • Good grammar and spelling

Other suggested business page topics:

  • Services
  • Interviews or news articles
  • FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
  • Events, Web Coupon
  • Links (to other related sites)
  • Staff
  • Helps/Tips
E-COMMERCE
There is a high likelihood that you, or someone you know, will eventually want a business site with the ability to actually pay for orders online. This can be a very expensive and complicated proposition, requiring setting up a merchant account at your bank, obtaining a secure transaction server, creating a PHP/ASP/CGI catalog, business agreements, etc. Here are some inexpensive web hosts that can simplify this for you at reasonable fees:

powweb (< $8/mo)
ipowerweb (< $8/mo)
PayPal
BuyitSellit

PROMOTING A WEBSITE
For most businesses the most common ways to promote their website is:

  • Advertising their URL in the local paper and on a business card
  • Joining similar webrings and banner/link exchanges.
  • Search for popular community directories to add the business link to.
  • Pay popular search engines for targeted "pay-per-click" ads
    [Overture][Google Ad Words]
  • LASTLY, adding the business site (URL) to popular search engines.

Lastly, because there are so many other websites competing against you that even if you carefully chose your search engine words and phrases you'll be lucky to get in the top 100 search results. But, it is still a good idea because there are so many people out there searching!

Before you ADD your URL to all the popular Search Engines it is necessary to have the following added to the HEAD of your first INDEX.HTML page. Think carefully about the words you choose!

<html>
<head>
<meta name="description" content="A short one line description of what the site is about goes here">
<meta name="keywords" content="a, collection,of words,and phrases,that someone looking, for your, page,might type,into,a search engine">
<title>Super Company</title>
</head>

NOW..how do you ADD your website to most of the popular search engines? You could spend hours and hours going to each Search engine and manually fill out each of their ADD URL/Suggest Website forms (You will have to at YAHOO.COM, but it's worth it because they are so popular) OR you can have a FREE Add URL Service do it for you!
Do a web search for FREE ADD URL and be ready to provide them with
a spammable junk email address, web address, site description, and keywords.