Adding Prices and Other Content

A never-changing site takes no work, once it is online, besides making payments for your domain name and hosting service when they are due, usually once a year.

Let's assume that your initial Web site draws enough business to be worth its keep. The next step is obviously to add content to it that may change from time to time. The most obvious question that your potential customers are likely to ask is, "How much does it cost?"

Now you get into the question of how much to tell them. This is an individual business decision, one you must base on your industry, your location, and the nature of the competition you face. And the second you start adding prices to your Web site, you suddenly must commit to keeping it up to date. No business needs customers complaining that an advertised price is incorrect. You may put a disclaimer on your site saying that prices should be confirmed before purchase or that you are not responsible for errors in prices shown on the World Wide Web, but all this will do is help keep you out of legal hot water. Inaccurate pricing on your Web site will still damage your reputation. Prices shown on your site, just like prices in a newspaper ad, must be the real prices you charge for real goods and services.

Changing a few lines on a Web site is not hard. You or one of your co-workers can easily learn to do it, either through one of the many basic HTML classes offered online or through local adult learning centers and community colleges almost everywhere in the world, or by simply buying a book or two and practicing on a fake site you set up that is not visible to the public. The elements of HTML code are simple, and the popular file transfer protocol (ftp) method of uploading content to a Web server is handled by easily-obtained, free or low-cost programs that usually take less than an hour of practice to master.

Simple Web site updating is also easy to farm out. It doesn't take design or programming skills. It's really nothing but a specialized form of clerical work, easily performed by almost anyone who has made a hand-coded personal Web site or two. Who prepares the actual site copy is up to you, and depends on your personnel resources. One advantage the Web has over print is that mistakes are easy and inexpensive to rectify after publication. If you find a typo after you have added new or updated material to your site, it is the work of moments to correct it. This doesn't mean you should allow sloppy wording to get by you. Rather, it means that you or your site maintenance person should be able to make the copy on your Web site better and keep it more timely than the copy in your printed materials.

Just as with any other kind of Web site, the basic design and architecture of a promotional site need to be carefully thought out in advance, and for best results the concept of information layering should be applied just as strictly to a site with three or four simple pages as to one with 500 pages.