Introducing Fig Creative Brands, a Maleny based marketing, branding and website business with a national and international target market.

Fig is a joint business venture of Jennifer Perri, Adrian Anderson and Nathan Arrowsmith, who have overlapping expertise in website development and business marketing, and all have been successful in business as individuals.

As a collective, Fig synergises the specialities of the individuals into a premium branding and marketing agency, with a focus on results – your results.

In addition to the three principals, Fig incorporates a network of specialist contractors, talented local professionals who round out our offering of professional services.

Our goal is ‘Growing Your Business’, and our success will be measured by your success. Check out www.figcreativebrands.com for more information, and feel free to say hello.

Your domain name is your home on the internet. It’s your online brand, it’s on your business cards, and it’s in your email address. You’ll be using it a lot, so it makes good sense to get the best one you can.

So what makes a good domain name? Starting with the suffix, a .com domain name is essential for a commercial business. Leave the .net and .org for networks and organisations.

If you’re doing business in Australia then a .com.au will be good to have also. You can put your website on either the .com or the .com.au, and redirect the other one, so both names will lead to your website.

www.example.com

www.example.com.au

Then comes the main part after the ‘www’s. If you can register an exact match of your business name, then that’s the way to go. If not, then you can be creative and use relevant descriptive or locality keywords. If you sell widgets, then www.examplewidgets.com could be an option. If your market is based in Maleny, then www.examplewidgetsmaleny.com would be a good choice.

Domain names can include a dash (-), however be wary of getting one in your domain name, as you will forever be reminding people to put the dash in, and if they forget then they may end up at another website instead of yours.

www.example-widgets.com

Keep it as short as possible, if your domain name is too long, there is more chance of forgetting or misspellings.

www.examplehasthebestwidgetsinmaleny.com

You can research available domain names on the Arrowsmith Websites Domains page.

The website development industry is composed of many small players. Professional website design firms are rarely larger than ten people, and many are just one person.

Why are there no big website design companies? Big companies offer website services along with their phone connection and internet services, but they are too big to offer the flexibility that small business requires, so they haven’t been very successful at it. It’s not like providing a telephone or internet connection where a handful of packages will cater to the majority of customers.

Websites are different; there is no one size fits all approach. To understand the unique needs of a small business, it helps if you are also a small business, with enough flexibility to be able to adapt to your customers unique requirements.

Thinking of starting a website? Before you chat to a website designer, you can create your own draft website just using a word document. This will be the kind of information your website designer will be requiring from you, so you can be prepared – which will save time and money, and allow for a more accurate quote.

Open a new document and consider page one as the home page. Decide what you need to say –what will your main heading be? What will you say in your first paragraph? This exercise will force you to focus on what you have to offer your customers, and it will give you an idea of how much information you will need to provide in order to give a complete overview of your business.

Create a new page for each section of your website. You may include a page for each product or service you offer, or just have one page as an overview of all your products or services. The contact page can be straightforward – just list all the methods of contacting your business.

Have a look at other websites in your industry to get ideas, and think about what it is that you like about your favourite websites. Communicate all this to your website designer to will help ensure that you get the most value from your website.

It’s obvious that you need a website to be in small business these days, but how do you go about organising the content that will be on your website? If you have a business plan (and you should, even if it’s basic), then you can use it as a starting point to develop your website content.

The summary of your business plan is analogous to your home page content. It contains an overview of your business: what you do; what you offer your customers; who are your customers; why they should do business with you; etc.

Your business plan will include a list of the products or services that you offer, with detailed descriptions. You can use this information to form the bulk of your website. It may require several sections to include all the information in an organised and easy-to-find manner.

Throw in a biography (often called ‘About Us’), and all your contact details and there’s the heart of your website. This process can be done in reverse. Putting together content for a website can be used as the basis for your business plan.

Business websites can be roughly categorised into three categories: brochure, ecommerce and hybrid.

1. Brochure website

This is for businesses operating in the ‘offline’ world, also referred to as ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses. They have a physical office or shop that they operate from, and they don’t sell goods or services through the internet.

A brochure website is simplest and most economical type of website; it can even be just a home page and nothing else. It’s an information source about your business – like a brochure that you would hand out to potential customers – that contains some sales and marketing copy and contact information.

A website for a restaurant could contain information about the style of food served, the location, operating hours, menus, how to contact or make a booking.

Increasingly, this is how people look for a business.

2. Hybrid Website

Businesses who operate a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business, but who also take advantage of the ecommerce possibilities the internet provides, are businesses that may have a hybrid website.

Diversifying your business to include an online component can introduce efficiencies and enable you to reach new markets.

Examples:

· retailer selling online
· banks
· newspapers

3. Pure ecommerce

With the explosion of internet use around the world, new business models have been appearing to take advantage of the new space.

Many businesses now operate purely in the online space, with no offline operations. This can be a very efficient way to conduct business, as ordering and fulfilment processes can be automated.

Examples:

· Google
· hotspotting.com.au
· eBay
· realestate.com.au