Connections Vol. 3 Issue 2 Spring 2008

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Web Site Differentiation

Using your USP to Position Your Company and Stand Out From the Crowd

By: Blaine R. Hilton

1-877-5-BLAINE

When you place your site on the Internet you are the proverbial small fish in the worlds largest ocean. Typical searches for standard terms such as "auto repair" or "hair stylist" result in tens of millions of results. Your site needs to be able to be easily pulled out of the bottom and brought to the top of the results.

Competitive Analysis

To begin to understand how to make your site better than your competitors you have to start by looking at your competitors themselves. Make a list of your biggest competitors, the ones that drive you crazy. _en using this list go to each of their sites and look through the pages. What do you notice?

• Does the site have quality content?
• Is it nicely laid out?
• Is it easy to read?
• Does it answer the questions that your prospective customers would ask?
• Does the site give you contact information?
• Does it explain their product/service offerings? How about pricing?

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Anytime you talk about marketing you are sure to hear someone talk about discovering your USP. It may sound redundant, but you really need to think through this. This is the reason why potential buyers should buy from you and not the other company. Some possibilities would include:

• Better Quality
• Faster Service
• Lower Price
• More Features
• Longer Warranty
• Higher Level of Credibility

When crafting your USP you want to think about how you can best position your company for now and the long term. If your USP is based solely on having the lowest price you may quickly find yourself with ever decreasing profits. On the other hand if you instead patented a revolutionary new product you could potentially charge a steep premium for that.

Your USP should be bold enough to make your competitors nervous. It also needs to be understood that over time your USP is going to, in all likelihood, change. This is because your company will change, as will your competitors and the marketplace as a whole. Nothing stays the same, so you need to remember to revisit this issue at least annually, but quarterly makes more sense in many industries.

Site Content

Once you see what your competitors are doing and have come up with your own USP, then you can start to think about applying it to your own site. As we have said in many previous articles content really is king on the web. Not only will the written word on your site help convince visitors to either buy from you or never contact you, but it is also the material that the search engines will use to find your site.

It is imperative that your site has high quality copy that is both easy to quickly scan and pull the important bits off of, and also at the same time in depth enough for the visitors with a million questions. This alone can be a tricky balancing act. There are many little things to help such as the judicial use of bulleting and using bolded headlines.

Site Design

After the site content is for the most part written then it’s time to look at how to arrange the text in the site. Are you going to have many pages? Are you going to divide the site into sections, and if so how? These questions along with more basic ones such as where is the navigation going to be and what color scheme are you going to use requires some thought.

In Conclusion

After talking about all of this though I want you to remember you do not have to have the #1 website in the world to be effective, instead you should be judging yourselves in the context of your peer sites, your competitors. As the saying goes if you are approached by a bear in the forest when hiking with a friend, you don’t have to outrun the bear, only your friend...

Hosting Explained

By: James R. Dragoo, Jr.

1-877-5-BLAINE

Does a website have a physical existence or is it just some entity that floats around in the cyberspace known as the internet? If you do not have a website you may have never really thought about this.

A website is hosted on a physical server, similar to a computer tower, somewhere in the world. A company will host the site, meaning that they rent out server space for your site to reside on. When they do this they charge you a monthly or yearly fee to place your website on this rented server space so the world can see and use the site.

Disk Space

There are a couple terms used when speaking of hosting. The first is Disk Space. Disk Space is the amount of space that you have rented on a server. Disk Space is similar to the amount of storage space you have on your personal or office computer. If you have a 60 Gigabyte hard drive then you have 60 Gigabytes of storage space. If you have 200 Megabytes of Disk Space rented on your hosting account then that is how much space you have available to use for the site. The average small business website only takes up about 20 Megabytes of Disk Space. Certain files, such as videos, can take up additional disk space. The remaining Disk Space you can use as storage for emails, which we will discuss later.

Bandwidth

The second main term used in hosting is bandwidth. Every time someone views a page on your site their computer sends a request to the server for that webpage and any files, such as images, that are contained within the page. This transfer of data between the server and the visitor’s computer in known as bandwidth.

You may be saying to yourself, "I understand disk space but why is bandwidth important?" Bandwidth is important because the transfer of files require resources from the server. The server must manage all of the requests and send the data to wherever it needs to go. You want to make sure you have plenty of bandwidth so that your site runs smoothly when visitors come by to visit. You also want to make sure that your hosting account has enough bandwidth for your site because if you run out of bandwidth your website could become temporarily unavailable.

Email

Earlier we mentioned that you can use your extra disk space for email storage. When a website is hosted and has a domain name you can have email addresses set up with that domain name. For example, instead of having your-name@yahoo.com or yourname@hotmail.com you could have your-name@yourbusiness-name.com. Having an email with your domain name on it looks more professional than a public email such as yahoo or hotmail. Your domain email addresses can be setup in your hosting account and the emails sent to these email addresses is stored on the server. This is why it is a good idea to have much more disk space than your site alone requires. The site itself may only take up a small amount of disk space but the emails may take up much more space depending on the file sizes of the emails.