Guest Post by DANIEL MEYEROV, www.OnlyBusiness.com

I. The Cost and Quality Equation
Entrepreneurs need to watch every penny.  So, they often look harder at cost rather than quality and value when creating a website. The result is often a cheap-looking website, a costly mistake for the entrepreneur.  In today’s business environment, the first impression that a user has of your website is the impression they apply to your business. A company website represents the brand of the organization and provides users with their first and lasting impression regarding the quality, professionalism and credibility of the business that owns it. Evidence suggests that most internet users determine their acceptance of a website, and willingness to do business with the promoted company, based on these parameters within the first seven seconds of viewing the homepage.

II. The Marketing Fallacy:  Built It & Customers Will Come
Entrepreneurs often focus on building a website and give little thought to what happens afterwards.  It seems they take the approach that if they simply build a website, customers, and sales, will follow. Like anything else in today’s cluttered marketplace, having a great product is not enough. Many website owners spend tens of thousands of dollars developing their websites, and then simply submitted them to the major search engines. They then sit back and wait for the orders and calls to start rolling in.  This, I assure you, never happens. An entrepreneur needs to ensure that the website – truly a “business asset’ is supported through ongoing marketing efforts and promotions. These efforts may range from online marketing initiatives (such as Search Engine Optimization activities to achieve high search engine positions for searches on relevant key words and phrases, Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns with the major search engines) to offline marketing efforts such as promoting your website in your current marketing channels (e.g. your radio ads, newspaper ads, phonebook listings, etc). 

III. It’s About the Customer:  Product-Centric vs. Customer-Centric
Entrepreneurs often create their website from their perspective of their company or product (known as a ‘product-centric’ approach) rather than from the perspective of their target market (known as a ‘customer-centric’ approach). If you focus your website on selling your product or service rather than on the benefits that you deliver to your customers through that product/service, you create a ‘distance’ between you and your potential buyers. The purpose of web business is to forge a strong relationship with your customers, which tell them through your website, that you understand their problems and you are delivering solutions to those problems. This is what holds the customer, not  simply selling units of an item.

IV. Transaction Security = Critical to Customer Confidience
Entrepreneurs often underestimate the concern that potential buyers have  as regards their website security or sense of ‘trustworthiness’ when it comes to online purchasing and sales, particularly when it comes to online credit card transactions. With the ‘detachment’ factor of distance purchasing, internet users are typically more concerned with security and ‘trustworthiness’ of doing business with a company on the web than in any other accepted business marketplace. This becomes an issue around ‘trust’ and ‘credibility’ that needs to be built into the website to give buyers a sense of comfort and peace-of-mind when purchasing from the site. 80%-90% of all cancelled purchase transactions occur at the point of credit card submission for payment.

V. Customer Experience
Entrepreneurs often overlook the ‘usability aspects’ and the ‘user experience’ of their potential customers when using their websites. Internet users want it all. i.e., stunning, ‘rich-media’ websites that have all of the information, web tools and imagery that creates an exciting and dynamic user experience and they don’t want to wait for it. The reality is that they are right.  With the vast amount of competition in almost every market, internet users do not have to wait for a slow site – they can simply go to the next one and they will not wait for long page downloads. Another related aspect is that Internet users will not read big blocks of text. The internet is a visual medium. Internet users will typically only read text if they want more detail on an aspect or item on your site and they are typically not comfortable doing large amounts of reading on a computer screen. Large blocks of text are very often ignored if there are no visual aspects such as imagery to capture their attention.

About the Author
Daniel Meyerov is CEO of OnlyBusiness.com, a business platform and community that provides small business with the tools and services they need for web success. Daniel is a global expert in the arena of business management, web strategies/commerce and supply chain management.  He has provided brand and web strategies for such leading companies as Coca-Cola and reality TV program Wedding in a Week, among others.  He and partner Mark Friedman have launched two Los Angeles-based web enterprises:  Polaris Blue (www.polarisblue.com) a design firm that serves a range of small to large-sized business needs and web strategies/implementation (including work for CBS and DirecTV), and OnlyBusiness.com (www.onlybusiness.com) an eCommerce platform for small businesses that provides comprehensive “one stop shop” strategies for effective, affordable, easy-to implement eCommerce community, website, hosting, shopping cart and marketing/management that has earned over 1700 small business subscribers to date.