Building a website initially can sometimes be a bit hard. It's not difficult from the technical side of things - your web developer looks after all that - the real toughie is that the owner of the website has to actually think about their own business or organization while keeping their viewer in mind. And that's probably the hardest part of setting up your website at the start - thinking about what it is you do and what you have to offer.

Of course there are ways around this; maybe you have already prepared some marketing information or brochures or the other way of spicing up your site is with the aide of a marketing company or even a professional wordsmith.
 
Once your website is setup then more then ever is when you have to remember your viewer as it's important to keep your website 'fresh'. Your website should be updated regularly and provide reasons for a viewer to return to your website.

There are a number of ways to do this and to help me explain I'll give you an example of a website that is also our feature site for this month.

www.bicyclingaustralia.com was originally developed by Bicycling Australia Magazine (BA) as a static website that was manually updated by their in-house web developer. This website was an online advertisement to promote the latest magazine sold at the newsagents and had a small classifieds section. On average the website had around 4000 individual viewers a month.

However the owner wanted to use the website to promote the bicycling show that they also run and to sell tickets to the show. In addition it was recognized that the classifieds were generating most of the traffic to the website but to update them was a laborious and manual process. Also BA thought it might be a good idea if viewers could subscribe to the magazine online, including gift subscriptions. They also decided to promote rides that they sponsored, locations where the magazine was sold and finally to automatically link likeminded businesses and associated websites. Finally, they also wanted to be able to send out email campaigns to viewers of the website and their clients. Ultimately though, they wanted to be able to update and edit information site-wide themselves, quickly and easily, without the need for web programming skills.      

Now their website is entirely database driven and they use a content management system to consistently amend images and text within the site (including past issues). They have integrated a rotating ad banner system to generate income for the website and the response to the new automated classifieds system has been overwhelming. BA are now able to send out email campaigns to communicate with their website 'members' and over the coming months will be including an online forum section, running competitions and providing ride information to further entice returning website traffic.

The really good news? The number of viewers to the website has grown to 26,000 per month and grows by an average of 1000-2000 every month, mostly generated by the community based classifieds system. Now 20% of all magazine subscriptions and show tickets are sold using their new online subscription and registration system at the website.