What are the three most important factors to consider when buying property? Location, location and location. If that property is a business, you want an attractive location, with lots of traffic and easy access: a main traffic route for a gas station, or a busy mall for a book store.
For business done on the internet, physical location is irrelevant. The cost and time to ship a product to my door from Toronto or Vancouver are almost the same. The low Canadian dollar and the removal of trade barriers offer a wonderful opportunity to anyone with a product to sell: the whole world is now your market. And with programs like Microsoft Front Page and Netscape Composer, anyone can build a web page ("virtual site") from which to sell their wares.
Whether you build your site yourself or hire an "expert", you should plan your web site as carefully as you plan your business site.
To begin with, you want an attractive and interesting virtual site, that reflects your business. Web design should follow the same rules you use when designing your store. Is it attractive and uncluttered? Can customers easily find what they are looking for? Have you checked the spelling on the signs?
Next, you need traffic. On the internet, this depends on "search engines". To find something on the web, you begin with a search site (Yahoo, Metacrawler,..) and enter key words (eg. "Ontario campgrounds"). For customers to find your site, it must not only be listed on those search engines, but be positioned near the top of the list when people search for your product. So, register with all the search engines and plan carefully what "key words" you should use.
Accessability on the 'net is just as important as in a store. If your page takes too long to appear on their screens, people get impatient and leave. Bear in mind that not everyone in this market has the latest equipment. A lot of phone systems around the world (including parts of Ontario!) can't yet handle fast modems. Don't assume that because your page pops up quickly on your machine it will do so for all your customers.
In fact, don't even assume that what you see is what your customers see. Web pages are written in computer languages (html, java) which were designed to work the same on all computers (eg. IBM and Macintosh) and all operating systems (eg. Windows, Unix, OS/2). This was a programmer's dream, but a software vendor's nightmare. NetScape or Microsoft would like nothing better than to corner the market and lock us all into using their particular programs. Many "enhancements" to these languages are specific to their products, and a web page using these features will work differently, or not at all, on others. For instance, my lovely "antique white" background, designed in Netscape on an SVGA monitor, appeared a garish magenta when viewed in Internet Explorer in VGA. Worse, some of these "features" can cause the browser to quit, and exit the program. I doubt if a customer ejected from your store would come back again! Web designers "fine tune" the code generated by web software to ensure it will work everywhere. (Using colour numbers, rather than names, restored my "antique white"). So, even if you didn't build the page yourself, you should test it out on different browsers and machines.
Finally, be aware that there's a trade-off: the fancier your page, the fewer people will be able to see it. Unless you are competing in a high-tech business and know that all your customers have the latest equipment, follow that other old business adage: keep it simple.
