by Mike Rohde

As a kid, I spent hours drawing and sketching ideas that popped into my head.

I used drawing as a primary language for capturing thoughts, exploring ideas, and then sharing those ideas. Teachers and mentors encouraged me, helping to sustain sketching as a key skill throughout school and into my professional career. Good fortune has ignited my passion to become a sketch advocate, helping others rediscover sketching as a powerful problem-solving and communication tool.

I’m excited to share why sketching can be so beneficial, show samples of sketches, and provide helpful resources. My goal is to encourage you—whether you’re a designer, front-end developer, coder, writer or whatever you may be—to add sketching to your toolkit.

But I can’t sketch—I’m not an artist!

When I suggest sketching as a visual thinking tool, I often I hear “I’m not an artist” or “I can’t draw.” While I understand the hesitation, I’m here to tell you that the artistic quality of your sketches is not the point. The real goal of sketching is functional. It’s about generating ideas, solving problems, and communicating ideas more effectively with others.

When you feel inadequate in your sketching, pause and reconsider your perspective. Don’t worry how well you draw. Instead, think of your sketching as visual thinking, which works regardless of your drawing quality. Ugly gets the job done just fine.

San Francisco: Google will begin allowing users to personally endorse search results and web pages, its latest attempt to stave off rival Facebook while trying to jump onboard a social networking boom.     The so-called “+1” button will start to appear alongside Google search results for select users letting people recommend specific search results to friends and contacts by clicking on that button.     Eventually, the feature may begin to influence the ranking of search results, though that is only under consideration. Results are now ranked via a closely guarded algorithm.     The world’s leader in internet search is battling to maintain its share of web surfers’ time and attention, which is increasingly getting taken up by Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. But it has struggled to find its footing in the nascent market.     Its last attempt to create a social network — Buzz — has not fared well. A flood of complaints about how Buzz handled user privacy cast a pall over the product. On Wednesday, Google announced it had reached a settlement with regulators under which it agreed to independent privacy audits every two years.     With the new +1 buttons, Google aims to counter one of Facebook’s most popular features. The new feature comes nearly a year after Facebook began offering special “Like” buttons to websites, creating a personalized recommendation system that some analysts believe could challenge the traditional ranking algorithms that search engines use to find online information.     Google said +1 recommendations will also appear in the paid ads that Google displays alongside its search results. In its internal tests, Google found that including the recommendations boosted the rates at which people click on the ads, executives told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.     Eventually, Google plans to let third-party websites feature +1 buttons directly on their own pages, the company said.     Google’s Matt Cutts, a principal engineer for search, said the +1 buttons were part of the evolution of Google’s own social search efforts, rather than a direct response to Facebook’s Like buttons.     Google introduced social search in 2009, and in February the company began displaying special snippets underneath any search results that have been shared by a person’s contacts on Twitter.     Currently Google is not using +1 recommendations as a factor in how it ranks search results — a user only sees that a friend recommended a search result if the result would have turned up in a search based on Google’s existing ranking criteria.     Google’s Cutts said the company is evaluating whether to use +1 recommendations as a ranking factor in the future.     To use the new recommendation system, users must create a Google Profile page. Any +1 clicks that a person makes will be publicly visible to their network of contacts, which is based on existing contacts in Google products such as the company’s Gmail and its instant messaging service.     Cutts said Google hoped to address any potential privacy concerns with the +1 service by making it clear that any +1 tags are public.     “As long as people have that mental model, they know what to expect, they’re not surprised if they +1 something and it shows up in a different context,” he said.

Source : TOI

Case Study for SMS marketing:

1. Brand: United Colours of Benetton

SMS Scheme: shop for 3999 and get free hamper of 999 exclusive @ UCB stores

Target Audience : A + category of aged 18 to 28 , HNI, High end car owners , Income wise , Students, Premium Credit and debit card holders

Geography wise Tier 1 : Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata

Volume: 1 CR

Response rate 8% : 8lac Footfall in stores

2. Brand: Arrow ( Arvind brands )

SMS Scheme: EOSS for Arrow with sale up to 50%

Target Audience : A + category of aged between 26 to 38 Male , HNI, High end car owners ,Frequent Flyers , Premium Credit and debit card holders, Corporate segment

Geography wise Tier 1 : Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata

Geography wise Tier 2 : Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Lucknow , Chandigarh, Indore , Pune , Gurgaon , Bhubaneswar , Baroda

Volume: 2 CR

Response Rate 5% : 10 lac Foot Fall in stores

3. Brand : Levis ( Denizen)

SMS Scheme: Buy 1 get 1 free form Levis Denizen

Target Audience: A B + category aged between 18 to 35 , Students , Credit and debit card holders, Income wise

Geography wise Tier 1 : Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata

Geography wise Tier 2 : Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Lucknow , Chandigarh, Indore , Pune , Gurgaon , Bhubaneswar , Baroda ,Nagpur

Volume: 5 CR

Response rate: 50 lac Footfall in stores

28 February, 2011
Google has rolled out a major change in their search algorithms and has re-designed them to push down the search rankings of websites that have low-quality pages. Google has termed these low-quality websites as ‘content farms’. To start with, Google has implemented this change in US only and plans to roll it out elsewhere over time. According to Google, their simple goal is to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible and ensure that the quality of results helps the company to improve Google Search.

Amit Singhal, Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer, Google, said, “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

According to Google, the changes will noticeably impact 11.8 per cent of the search queries made on Google.com. “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does,” the company said.

The total market of cloud computing in India stands at US$ 110 million today and is expected to reach a figure of about US$ 1,084 million by 2015, finds a research study. In the cloud computing market in India, Software-as-a-Service has witnessed the most rapid uptake until now.



As a component of the overall cloud market, Software-as-a-service (SaaS) in India is likely to reach a mark of US$ 650 million by 2015, while Platform-as-aservice (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) markets cumulatively would touch US$434 million each, by then. The domestic market for SaaS is estimated to be about US$ 66 million and is currently dominated by Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP and Email workloads.

There are several multinational and Indian companies entering the cloud space and trying to drive business relevance of its solutions for the Indian customers. Cloud computing has allowed the smaller ISVs access to global customers, thereby, significantly reducing their cost of sales. On the other hand, this has also increased the flexibility for end customers and increased the choice of products and services.
In addition to the global providers of PaaS, Indian companies have also sprung up offering cloud based Platform-as-a-Service. India being the world’s fastest growing mobile market with over 20 million subscribers added every month and the money that companies have invested for 3G services showcases the belief the large telecom providers have on data services in the Indian market. Also, over 500 million people form the middle class in India, and the products and services consumed by them are relevant to other emerging markets as well. All this clearly suggests that Indian customers are ideal for cloud offerings.
As Indian SMBs tend to lack budgets, want business improvement, lack management bandwidth required to manage internal IT and are looking for rapid growth in the next few years. For all of this put together, ‘Cloud Computing’ is indeed the answer”.
Public, Private or Hybrid Clouds?
Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Depending on the type of data you are working with, you will want to compare public, private, and hybrid clouds in terms of the different levels of security and management required.

PUBLIC CLOUDS
A public cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are provided offsite over the Internet. These clouds offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources; however, they are also more vulnerable than private clouds. A public cloud is the obvious choice when
Your standardized workload for applications is used by lots of people, such as e-mail.
You need to test and develop application code.
You have SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from a vendor who has a well-implemented security strategy.
You need incremental capacity (the ability to add computer capacity for peak times).
You are doing collaboration projects.
You are doing an ad-hoc software development project using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering cloud.
Many IT department executives are concerned about public cloud security and reliability. Take extra time to ensure that you have security and governance issues well planned, or the short-term cost savings could turn into a long-term nightmare.

PRIVATE CLOUDS
A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network. These clouds offer the greatest level of security and control, but they require the company to still purchase and maintain all the software and infrastructure, which reduces the cost savings. A private cloud is the obvious choice when-Your business is your data and your applications. Therefore, control and security are paramount.
Your business is part of an industry that must conform to strict security and data privacy issues.
Your company is large enough to run a next generation cloud data center efficiently and effectively on its own.
To complicate things, the lines between private and public clouds are blurring. For example, some public cloud companies are now offering private versions of their public clouds. Some companies that only offered private cloud technologies are now offering public versions of those same capabilities.

HYBRID CLOUDS
A hybrid cloud includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By spreading things out over a hybrid cloud, you keep each aspect at your business in the most efficient environment possible. The downside is that you have to keep track of multiple different security platforms and ensure that all aspects of your business can communicate with each other. Here are a couple of situations where a hybrid environment is best.
Your company wants to use a SaaS application but is concerned about security. Your SaaS vendor can create a private cloud just for your company inside their firewall. They provide you with a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security.
Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets. You can use a public cloud to interact with the clients but keep their data secured within a private cloud.
The management requirements of cloud computing become much more complex when you need to manage private, public, and traditional data centers all together.

Transition Inhibitors
Despite its innate value, cloud computing has a few inhibitors that seem to impact the speed at which implimentation takes place in India. From the infrastructure standpoint five major parameters that can enable or inhibit enterprise customers (and SMBs) from moving to Cloud. Performance; wherein Application performance needs to be same or better than before. Reliability – here enterprise mission critical applications have a very high level of reliability – the current cloud computing platforms are not matching the requirements Security – This is the biggest inhibitor of adoption at this time, where organizations are not yet comfortable of moving their data to public environments outside their firewalls or even visibility and control of the Cloud infrastructure (for users) – the Cloud environment needs to provide extensive monitoring, logging and reporting support to troubleshoot the environment SLAs – Cloud Computing environment providers, while claiming a very robust environment, have yet to provide high levels of service guarantees, at operational level and security level. As the provider community practices mature, these would be in place On the application/solutions front, the biggest inhibitor is the lack of clarity on what applications (from their portfolio) make good business sense to move to cloud. The second inhibitor is that while the application in the cloud is very economical, the transformation of applications to be “in the cloud” is expensive and takes time and effort.

Source : TOI

THE advertising industry is all set to see some hectic action with all the biggies in the telecom industry — one of the top three categories in terms of ad spends — launching their 3G services. Advertising in the telecom space is expected to see a spike of almost 50 per cent in the next six months, against an annual advertising growth expected to be around 30-32 per cent. In 2009, the telecom sector’s ad spends across TV, press and radio (monitored media) was around Rs 1,200 crore.

“If we look at the figures for the last two years, telecom advertising growth has been around 26-30 per cent while the advertising industry has been growing at 10-12 per cent.

However, this year, in the last six months the segment has not seen much growth compared to last year as most players were in a wait and watch mode. Now that issues like number portability and 3G have got a go-ahead, the companies will start advertising heavily. Telecom advertising is expected to grow by 50 per cent in the next six months,” said Nandini Dias, COO of media agency Lodestar UM.

“There will be a bouquet of new campaigns across media, especially television, in the coming months.

Everyone has a new toy and wants to show it off to the world. This can become one of the key drivers of growth for the Rs 21,000 crore advertising industry in the coming year,” said LV Krishnan, CEO of TAM India, which measures TV viewership and also monitors advertising expenditure.

However, most of the players are tightlipped about their advertising and marketing strategy around 3G, given the competitiveness in the category. Tata Docomo recently unleashed its catchy campaign announcing the launch of its 3G service on November 4. The film is running across all channels, with heavy support on outdoor and other media. The 40-second TV commercial created by ad agency DraftFCBUlka shows people spot-jogging in every imaginable place, their hearts pounding, as they get set for `3G Life’. “We are going to build a lot of hype around 3G.

Telecom operators can expect a spurt in their advertising revenues with the launch of 3G services as top advertisers script plans to tap the huge potential of the medium that includes personalised delivery of audiovisual mobile advertisements with interactive features.

The third generation telephony, with high-speed internet speed and services like mobile TV and live gaming, has been a great driver of mobile advertising in all the markets it is available. The story is expected to be the same in India, justifying telcos’ spending Rs 68,000 crore for its licences.

“3G may completely redefine the media mix for Indian advertisers,” said Debadutta Upadhyaya, VP (India) for Vdopia, a US-based mobile video advertising platform that has done 3G mobile ads for clients such as Coke, Warner Brothers and Disney.

She said companies are currently not excited about mobile advertising because they cannot deliver the brand experience through bland SMSes and plain-vanilla WAP banner ads.

But 3G will allow much better delivery of more creative advertising content. And marketers are excited.
“A lot of the TV advertising can be replicated in mobiles through 3G, with far bigger impact. Mobile advertising in 3G will have scope for interactive and personalisation of content,” said L K Gupta, chief marketing officer of LG Electronics India.

The country’s largest consumer electronics and home appliances firm, which currently uses SMS-based ads to manage consumer relationship like after-sales service and loyalty schemes, plans to use 3G mobile ads for brand promotion, said Mr Gupta.

The size of the Indian mobile advertising market, estimated at $15 million, is growing by 50-60%.

Advertising industry people expect marketers to increase their spent on mobile advertisement to 7-10% of their total adspend from current 2-3% within two years of 3G launch.

It’s quite likely going by the experience in other countries. In Australia, for instance, the mobile advertising market grew by more than 300% a year since 3G launch in 2007. In the US, 3G ads pushed the mobile advertising market to about $416 million last year. In the UK, the entertainment, media and telecom sectors have spent the largest amount of their advertising budgets for mobile advertising, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“There is no doubt 3G can increase the value of mobile advertising to the advertiser provided the telecom operators are active,” said Sam Balsara, chairman and managing director of advertising firm Madison World.

The DoT estimates that 3G mobile subscriber base in India will reach the 90 million mark by 2013. A study released by research firm Crisil on Monday said there will be 100 million 3G users in the country within five years of its launch.

A slew of marketers such as Marico, electronics firm Samsung and jewellery retailer Geetanjali Group have big plans for 3G.

“3G will be a big enabler and improve access,” said Sameer Satpathy, marketing head of FMCG firm Marico.
Samsung plans to take its mobile advertising campaigns from metros to smaller cities with 3G, while Geetanjali will increase the share of mobile advertising several folds from less than 2% of ad budget at present.
Telcos too are gung-ho. “We will strive for such (3G advertisement) revenue once we have been able to deliver great experience to the consumers,” said Llyod Mathias, chief marketing officer at Tata Teleservices, which has won nine 3G circles.

Vdopia expects 3G mobile ads in India to find bigger acceptance from FMCG, entertainment, auto, consumer electronics and technology companies. It plans to grow its 3G ad business as its main revenue stream in India and will roll out its global technology here.

Source : Economic Times

Solutions Infini is the Official Communication Partner for India’s Largest Wine Festival – “Bangalore International Wine Festival”. BIWF is going to be held between 10th and 11th April, 2010 and will run from 12:00pm till 10:00pm at White Petals, Palace Grounds, Bangalore. The event will showcase wines from all over the world and allow wine drinkers and novices to experience and understand the vast world of wine. Its the biggest wine event in South India with participants from 3 continents and some great band performing along with Fashion shows, Dance and DJ’s. This two day event would be first of its kind in India. A minimum of 20,000 footfalls are expected in the event spread across two days.

Website Development – What Needs to Be Done and How Much Does It Cost
Today’s businesses require letterhead and envelopes, business cards, ads in the Yellow Pages, Justdial and web pages as part of their business stationary. Even if you have the smallest of businesses with a limited clientele, a website is part of your professional arsenal to attract and keep clients.
People new to the Internet or web pages tend to see them as complicated or expensive. They are neither, unless you choose to allow them to be. They are, in their simplest form, a billboard on the information highway, advertising your wares and expertise for all to see – if they can find you.
Like a billboard, potential clients must travel down that particular road to see the signs. To ensure a successful website, make sure your website address is featured on all of your business cards, letterhead, classified ads, shop signs, yellow pages listings or ads, emails, and any advertising.
The cost of a website should be a natural inclusion in your financial accounting as a business expense for advertising or stationary. The initial set up costs may be high, but add these to the long term expense of the site to make the figures more reasonable.
The process of creating a website is three fold. Let’s look at the various areas you need to focus on to develop your own website.

Website Development
Most companies think of websites as promotional tools for their business. Today, websites are an arm of your business, representative of your company’s customer service efforts and policy. They serve the public needs, not your needs. Developing a website today means understanding how people use websites to gather information and make decisions, and maximizing that criteria with the resources, services, and products you offer.
Putting the user first, your website design and development needs to be organized way so people can easily access the information they require to help them make a decision or be informed. What information do they need to have, what do they want, and how can you best provide it.

Another important part of website development is targeting your audience. In order to make your website work, you need to help people find it. This includes search engine submission, concentration on keyword writing and content, and providing content worth linking to, letting others direct users to your site. Most of all, the content must have value, so a lot of focus needs to be on the writing, writing style, spelling and grammar, and creating clear, easy to understand content. The better the quality of content the more likely people are to find the site and stick around.

Website Design & Search Engine Optimization
Designing a website is the creative side of the process and involves the expertise of the site owner, marketing and advertising departments, artists, photographers, writers, technical writers, programmers, and code experts. This list of experts can be a whole team or one person. Either way, it is a team effort to combine all these skills and talents to complete an interesting and professional website.

Website design requires clear direction from the research within the website development plans. Focusing on the user’s access to the information, a solid navigation menu is critical, helping the user find the information they need.
Website design and layout needs to combine navigation and content with graphics and photographs that help guide the user and showcase products and services. Website designers are constantly battling between new technologies and their creative desires and bandwidth, seeking a compromise between the three. It’s not an easy task, and requires good coding and design skills, so this isn’t part of developing your website that should be cheap. It is the largest part of your website budget.

Along with the design comes the writing. Search engines can’t find you if there is no text to search. Quality written content is critical to a successful website, rich with keywords and website style writing. While the look of the site is critical to its visual success, what it has to say is more important. Content matters, so make sure that it is well written.

Website Maintenance
After the development and design, someone must maintain the site. This can be as simple as looking at it once a week to see that it is still there and working, or more intensive such as adding frequent updated information or content regularly. In general, a small site (1-10 pages) may require 2-20 hours a month to maintain properly. If designed well to begin with, a small site can be ignored for months on end, except for the occasional check-in.

For good search engine optimization (SEO), you need to really consider how page rank in search engines plays a critical role in how people find your site when they search. Part of the criteria is how often the site and the content and links are updated. So frequent additions and updates to your site will help keep your site at the top of the search engine results.
Links need to be checked for dead ends, responses to comments and feedback checked and action taken, the site and database backed up, and a whole variety of common website maintenance tasks. You can do this yourself, or hire someone called a webmaster to maintain and monitor your site on a regular basis.

How Much Does a Website Cost?
The more time you spend preparing for your website design and development, researching demographics, identifying your audience and collecting the information needed for the website, the less time and money you have to pay a developer and designer to research this information for you. The developer and designer will go through the information with you, but the better prepared you are, the faster and easier the process is for everyone. If you have money to splurge, hire them to do this research and preparation for you, as they will know what to look for as they prepare your site.
A lot of information is required before sitting in front of the computer and laying out the first page, though many people start with the design of a page before getting to its content. What goes INTO a web page is more important than how it looks, at least to start. The prettiest web page is worthless without good content that keeps the viewer there after the first blush of “wow” is over.

For your information, the average price for development of a basic website (5-10 pages) is between INR 50,000 – 70,000. The diverse range is based upon how many professionals are involved, their expertise and reputation, the length of project time, the complexity and sophistication of the development and design, and the inclusion of animation, interaction, e-commerce or advertising.
On average, it can take 40 to 60 hours to design a one to five page website, even for a professional. Expect longer hours for more pages, dependent upon their complexity and content. Hourly rates range from INR 1000 – 1300 per hour. Different regions offer more or less than the average rate.
The bottom line? If you pay less than INR 30,000 to produce a web page, you are probably getting someone inexperienced or less than qualified, which could result in problems in the future with the design or less promotional coverage. A well-designed website must meet certain standards and requirements established by professional organizations, including meeting the country or state accessibility laws for the handicapped, which means you need to go with an experienced web developer and designer, or spend hours learning these rules and regulations yourself.

Domain name and website hosts fees are typically not included in the website design and development. Domain name fees are for one year, though they may be discounted if purchased for more than one year’s service. Web site host “rents” space on their computers to host your website. The come in all shapes and sizes, offering various products, storage sizes, email accounts, and services.
Plan your website budget to include the initial set up fee spread across the length of time you expect the site to remain basically as it is. Typically, a website requires only minor changes and updates to its development and design for at least three years, sometimes five if the page is very simple. The website design and development industry is still evolving, so changes to the underlying structure might be required within the three to five year life of the site to keep up with technological advances.
Benefits of having a website

Do you think having a website is an avoidable cost? Although the Internet no longer remains a “new” technology there are still many business owners who are averse to the idea of having a business website either because they are not comfortable with the new medium or they simply deem it unnecessary. Now, we are not suggesting that the guy selling pani puri at the street corner should definitely have a business websites (well, why not?), but if there is business somewhere and you cannot do it simply because you don’t have a website then we will say that you are missing a big opportunity by not having a website.
Having a business website immediately propels your visibility and reach to a higher level. All of a sudden you are accessible to your customers and clients 24×7. Both old and new customers find you approachable and progressive.

We at Solutions Infini mean to proselytize you but here is a list of 12 benefits of having a website, whether business or personal.

1. Instant visual representation
Just imagine what thrust your business would get if people from all over the globe could visually see the products or service options you have to offer. All information pertaining to your business can be put on your website so that your prospective customers and clients can view it at their own convenience and without you having to be there each time something needs to be explained.

2. Keep your business open all the time
When you decide to offer business through your website, it is like a store or an office whose doors are never closed; people can come in and review your products and services at their convenience. In between if they want to do business with you and if your website is automated enough they can do even that. This way you can run your business non-stop without having to put in the extra hours.

3. New customers and clients can find you through search engines
Once you have accumulated a decent amount of information on your website people begin to find you on the search engines for the keywords and expressions relevant to your website. For instance if you sell perfumed candles and if someone searches for “sandalwood aroma candles” and if you have information on “sandalwood aroma candles” then there is a great possibility that people will find you on various search engines, come to your website, and place orders for sandalwood aroma candles.

4. Easier and cheaper advertising
Publishing on your website doesn’t cost you extra unless you are paying for every new page you create. Once you have set up the basic website structure you can keep adding new pages without incurring extra cost.
You can also complement your advertising efforts with your website. There are two ways of doing this. Whenever you publish your advertisement you can include your URL so that the information that you cannot include in the advertisement can be easily viewed on your website. Once your online traffic has gained momentum you can even run advertisements directly on your website. The best way of doing this is developing an online community so that lots of traffic builds up.

5. Highly enhanced public relations
You might not know that hundreds of or even thousands of your customers and clients might be using the Internet for all their information and research needs. Millions of views are exchanged on the World Wide Web. If some disparaging news regarding your organization gets circulated you can easily counter it, or at least present your own side of the story, through your website. High-value content and regular interaction with your visitors makes sure that you have a dedicated community of evangelists who would like to protect your brand and reputation even at the cost of putting in extra effort.
The more you interact through your website the more solid your reputation grows.

6. Reach distant markets
At Solutions Infini, a Bangalore based web design company, we get web design projects from all over the world and from very high-profiled clients. This becomes possible because our website is easily accessible to everybody who has an Internet connection. If you provide a service that can be delivered via the Internet or if you have a product that can be easily dispatched after taking an online order then you should definitely tap into this vast online market and promote your business in different parts of the world.

7. Create extra income streams
You can start new business ventures from scratch if you run them through your website. Unlike starting business ventures in the brick-n-mortar world the Internet ventures require very little startup income and they can be initiated in a matter of few days, or even few hours. In order to start a new business all you have to do is, have a great idea or product ready, register a domain suitable to your business, obtain a web hosting account, design the website or get it designed and hurray! You are ready to go.

8. Interact with your customers and clients regularly and obtain their feedback
Compared to telephonic conversations it is a lot easier to interact with your customers and clients through e-mails, blog posts and regular updates on your website. You can also host a forum where your customers and clients can leave feedback and exchange ideas regarding your service. This will improve your goodwill and reputation a lot and will also nurture a sense of trust and transparency. Getting good feedback to your website can be extremely critical to your further product development and service improvement efforts. You won’t have to wait for months and even years to know how your products and services are being received by your consumers.

9. Conduct low-cost market research
Since it hardly costs your visitors any money to participate in quizzes and polls on your website you can use these marvelous tools to conduct low-cost market research and launch new products and services or make improvements to existing products and services.

10. Save on office space
If you manage most of your business operations through your website then you hardly need office space. There are many online store companies that conduct millions of dollars of transactions online every month and still don’t need a place to stock their inventory. Some online companies don’t even have regular staff; all they do is take orders from the website and then forward those orders to the original manufacturers and suppliers. All they have to do is maintain and promote a website and this can be done from your basement too.

11. Establish your brand
Many artists, authors and consultants establish and promote their brands through their websites and blogs. They make use of their authority and knowledge to create a fan following. Numerous bloggers and webmasters have got great book writing contracts through their websites.

12. A website opens a slew of new opportunities
There is a complete new world out there on the World Wide Web. Millions of people access the Internet for leisure, communication, education and business every day. It is a huge business, marketing and promotion potential for your organization.