Generally speaking, I am sure many of you out there shares my view that our own corporate web pages are generally not well visited (but of course, we cannot are not talking about the corporate web pages of companies like Microsoft or Netscape whose sites has thousands of visitors each day, I am talking about general companies which are not huge market leaders in their own industry).

I always look in amazement how some sites can achieve say 1000 - 2000 visitors per day, and some do not even have 10 visitors per day. I always ask myself this question, is Internet really for having fun, gather pictures of your favourite idols, download the latest games, etc. etc., and NOTHING for business people like us?

That, of course, is not the true case. Of course, it helps if you are IBM, Microsoft or NetScape, which is, huge industry leaders in your own rights. If you are one of them, you already have done your "prep-work", so visitors go looking for your web pages, instead of you go looking for visitors.

What "prep-work"??

All leading companies understands the concept of advertising. They understand the concept of marketing. They understand the concept of public relations. They invest millions of dollars yearly to make sure they are known, and remained known. For small and middle-scale companies (which generally makes up about 70%-90% of country's total number of companies), can we whip up $1million for advertising? The answer is a very apparent NO WAY!

Aside from having to be realistic of our own corporate strength, and be realistic of what we could achieve, I feel that there are a lot more out there which could be done, by web owners and also by businesses who are considering whether they should promote themselves on the Internet.

In order for our web pages (which contains our corporate info/products/services etc.) to be well visited, we have to do more work than just putting up a web page, and expect visitors to come by themselves.

Web owners cannot just sit down and hope for the best that there will be visitors to their web site. For such web owners, each day, they check the visitor's counter and hope that there are more visitors. Day to day passed and with limited number of visitors, their exposure in the Internet are limited, by people whom the web owners inform of, or by people who accidentally types the wrong URL!

I feel that it is no good just to have a web page on the net. There are hundreds of thousands of web pages out there, so we must be able to move in a direction where we inform and let everyone out there knows of our web page. Of course, it would be almost impossible to let EVERYONE knows, but if we can have a LOT of people who uses the web knows of our web pages, it would be much more beneficial.

First, establishing a proper and easily identifiable corporate image is highly essential. If you need to purchase some goods, and are given two companies' names, each has fairly the same strength and weaknesses. You are also given their URL to check out their web site for more product information. One shows http://www.theirisp.com/~123company , and the other shows http://www.abccompany.com. Which one is easier to remember? Which one is easier to identify with their respective owner? It is a straightforward answer. If you own your own domain name, it speaks better of your corporate image and makes it easier for others to find you, easier to find means more access. So this is the step number one to take.

Okay, after having our own domain name, it still does not guarantee that visitors will visit your web site. There is a very straightforward explanation to it, you have not done your marketing yet!

There are several (in fact, many) ways to promote your web site. The most common are printing the website address on your calling-cards, letter-heads, and putting the website address on advertisement you place on newspapers, TVs, periodicals, journals etc.

You MUST also announce yourself to the world. You should get yourself listed in search engines, as far possible, as many as possible. This way when a lost soul searches those search engines for product categories, he/she could end up visiting your website.

Another way is through direct e-mailing. Let your associates know of the website address, make it simple on your message to allow them launch their software to visit the website address directly etc.

Mass e-mailings (blind e-mailings) can also be done. But you must be prepared for angry recepients (unless you know the group you are sending to are ready for your type of announcements), and angry responses. This type of promotion is not popular (especially with the recipients!) but it is known to achieve its purposes.

The next way is to do announcements on the newsgroups and mailing lists. Please remember to announce on only appropriate newsgroups and list, else like the mass e-mailings, you might get some very angry responses!

A thought just came to me, no one seems to have done this before, but you can try (don't quote me though!). It is announcing your website via mass-faxing. I have not received any such faxes before, and would probably junk such faxes directly to the rubbish bins (although I might take a closer look if the mass fax is well done up). Just a wild thought, not a known and tested method. ;-)

There are of course many other ways to do such marketing and promotions, and I am quite sure many people out there can think of better and more innovative ideas. So try out as many ideas as possible, and let me know if you live after that. ;-)

So, with the marketing done, you now expect visitors to your website. There is one BIG thing to note is, you must do repetitive marketing, so that new Internet users get informed, potential visitors who missed your previous announcements are also informed. It is definitely not a one-off job.

With the marketing idea in mind, we need to look into another aspect, your website itself.

When I browse around corporate web pages, I am disappointed to find majority (and I am talking about a huge majority) of web pages are just established, and then forgotten about.

Some of the pages I saw are as old as early 1995 or even 1994, and has not been updated after that. The information are old and and most outdated. I do not fault those owns the web pages, I would blame those who runs the web pages for the owners.

Why do I say so? Simple. There are hundreds of companies out there who provides web hosting, web authoring services etc. However, many of those companies who provides the Virtual Domain Hosting (hosting your web site at their location with their hardware) do just that, and ONLY just that. They just give the owners of the web pages the space, and expects the web owners to do the html authoring, designing, programming etc. etc. by themselves.

So web owners will just get some Tom, Dick or Harry (with no puns intended for any Tom's, Dick's or Harry's out there) to do up their web pages, put it up at the virtual domain site, and that's it.

Either that or they put someone in their corporation to handle the web authoring. But this someone might not be specialising in such jobs, as such, would not do the job better than a person who does it day in day out. Therefore it makes good sense to get yourself a good web page authoring person or company.

Web Authoring services do not come cheap. Also, most such companies do it for you once, and that's it. So this is also one point you should seriously ponder on.

Web sites should be designed in such a way that it attracks visitors, bearing in mind the best promotion is done by word of mouth. If you have an interesting and/or attractive site, more likely than not you would have repeat visitors.

I often dislike web sites which has loads of graphics, takes me twenty minutes just to load up their index page, just to find ONE single product. Therefore, ease of navigation and speed of the pages are also considerations you should have. There is no point to have HUGE fanciful pages if it makes navigation poor and slow.

Update your web pages often, be sure you allow the visitors to be informed of your latest company and product/services information, product/services pricings etc. as you would via the good old telephone and fascimile.

With all said and done, I am confident that your web site will do well. The keyword here is committment. Committment to your web site that is. If you cannot afford the time to do that, get someone or some companies who can do that for you to do it properly.