Advice on Internet policy
Creation and hosting
Internationalising Web sites
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Creating an Internet site
The creation of a site on the Internet is a matter of communication. The medium is not the
same as paper. It has to be used properly to be effective. As an additional means in a
communication policy, it is important to fully clarify the points below before creating a
site.
Is a Web site for you?
You don’t need a Web site if your market is locally based and needs actual contact. If you are a shoe repairer or fishmonger, your market is usually limited to a fairly reduced area and you need direct contact with the customer.
If, on the other hand, you are a specialist shoe repairer mending and caring for hand-made shoes, your potential market includes people who would not hesitate to send their shoes to the other end of the world to get them mended. Such specialists are rare, and so are much sought after.
An Internet site can be worthwhile, as below for example, if your business is not limited geographically or by the need for interaction.
The aim of the site
Do you want to sell (to businesses, private individuals or a specific group of consumers), buy (find suppliers), communicate (with your customers or colleagues), find new customers and/or maintain contact with existing customers (catalogue of products, orders on line or not)? Is it a corporate site just for putting out information, or an interactive site?
Who is it aimed at?
Businesses, private individuals, the national or export market.
The page style for the Internet site
As we shall see in the "Techniques" chapter, unlike printed matter, the Internet site enables a wide range of special effects (moving pictures, sounds, all sorts of interactive actions). Don’t be easily impressed by sites with attractive graphics. The "Techniques" chapter will tell you more about the limits of graphics and animations and their main drawbacks. Choose a plainer style, yet one that is still appealing.
Colours
This is an important decision to make: can the colours of your documents and/or logo be easily transposed to the Internet medium? If you just change them for your Web site, we strongly advise you to retain them at least for your home page, and to take them up discretely on each of the site’s pages. And above all, don’t transpose your documents onto the Internet as they stand: the net has its own requirements that simply cannot be met like that.
The creation of your site
If your have people in your business with a minimum understanding of information technology and a reasonable knowledge of how the Internet works, you can set about creating your own site yourself. To create a basic site, there are now inexpensive programs greatly helping the creation and administration of html pages for Internet sites. Navigation within your site ought to be simple and users should always be able to go back to the first page, so it is not a question of creating a giant labyrinth.
Special effects and other animation
Keep it simple. The presentation should be attractive and dynamic, while staying within the bounds of technology (if pictures are too large in size, the waiting time causes visitors to quit). Avoid falling into the maw of technology and adopting the latest techniques available on the market because users cannot necessarily see them with older versions of navigators.
The next chapter gives you a few basic rules for optimising a site on a purely technical plane, to enable a quality layout and make navigation around your site easier.
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