by Dustin Schwerman

A website is a program. Never let this fact escape you. Naturally, your primary goal when developing your site is to make your point or sell your product, but to treat it as merely an online store or large-scale advertisement is ignoring a significant portion of its possible value. SEO takes a lot of time, pay-per-click advertising takes money, and even when you start getting hits, you have only begun the phase of testing your site for usability and persuasiveness. What it all comes down to is that it will take time before your website starts to turn a profit.

But that doesn't mean it has to be a liability until then. If you have a skilled web designer working on your site - or even better, as part of your team--you can include a variety of functions and advanced pages to simplify certain processes of running a business.

An on-line database is in itself a very powerful tool. You can create an administration system that allows you to store, sort, edit, delete, and retrieve information ranging from products to client preferences to payroll. And your designer can create a variety of customized pages to access and display the information.

You might publish some of it to the web, creating an on-line catalogue for your customers. There, they can see images, names, descriptions, and prices of all of your products, searching by category, item, or even price range. There is no need to print entire magazines; a simple business card is all it takes to provide a link to the catalogue, which with the addition of e-commerce programs becomes an on-line store. The best part is, you can add as much detail as you want on secondary pages without worrying about the cost of paper and toner, and any change to the database automatically corrects the catalogue for all viewers.

You might have a list of jobs stored in the database, organized by area so you can determine which of your employees is closest to the site. Specifications and notes can all be stored and referenced, allowing you to easily keep on track. Such a tactic also allows your employees to get their jobs from their computers at home. You can even add functions so that clients are able to check on the status of their job.

You can also handle payrolls and invoicing using on-line programs, an especially valuable option for workers who are paid on commission. Once the jobs are input into the database, output pages can create invoice and payroll pages automatically that can be printed directly from your computer. Your employees can also check the status of their jobs any time, to see what their next pay check is going to be, how close they are to incentives, and similar information.

On-line programs can be useful for a business even before the actual website takes off. The advantage here is customization and accessibility. Unlike a normal program, these can be custom-created for your business, including any specifications and extras that will help you. Additionally, they can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection, possibly allowing you the option of running your business from home, saving your employees the time and gas money of a daily commute to the office.

About the Author

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique--Affordable Custom Website Design. Truly Unique specializes in creating highly customized, visually impressive websites at affordable prices.

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