Initiating an Online Business Presence

Building your online presence can be challenging for both newcomers and the already initiated, but you don’t need to start from scratch. Instead, a better idea can be to take inspiration from existing relevant pages, adopting their concepts for yourself. From creating a social media presence to building individual pages; finding a path can be simple if you know where to look.

Delving into Social Media

Social media can be an immense beast, but it’s not as complicated as it might first appear. For most users, getting involved in social media can be as simple as starting with Facebook, and then moving into avenues like Instagram or Twitter.

For Facebook, your goal should be to create a simple listing of what your business does. Facebook, like most social media systems, has limited customization options, so getting started is easy. Consider the Facebook page for eBay as an example. Aside from basic information and links, this page operates much the same as any general user page would, with the addition of some custom graphics.

“Facebook” (CC BY 2.0) by Sarah.Marshall

Twitter and Instagram can be similarly effective, though might be more confined to specific audiences. If your business relies on timed specials, Twitter is well suited for this purpose. For businesses that involve heavier visual components such as works in progress, Instagram can be a great way forward with images and time-lapse videos.

Binding these ideas together is the mood you wish your social media presence to convey. Some businesses will want to keep their accounts clean and professional. Others might want to lean more into humanization and humor – it depends on you and your customer base.

Crafting your Webpages

If working on a website, finding the appropriate form for pages to take can be more of a challenge. As a starting point, you’ll want to have a theme and framework in mind, but, within this setting, individual tastes and goals can allow for an enormous amount of personalization.

For the framework itself, it’s important to remember that functionality comes first. It doesn’t matter how visually impressive your website is if it’s clunky and unintuitive to use, so for the sake of keeping customers clicking, you need to keep this component simple. For our first example of this, we could use the CBS News entertainment section as a base.

In this section, the goal is to quickly lead readers to longer and more targeted content. There are many articles sorted through to create this page, yet the page itself doesn’t want to overwhelm. To keep things simple, CBS’s recommendations are listed simply, standing out through either title, description, images, or a combination of these elements.

A more data-centric form of this idea could be found in review pages like those operating with online casinos, for example. An example of this is demonstrated with a Leo Vegas casino review, where users can click here for additional reading. More informationally dense, these pages use simple boxes and colors to separate sections like game assortment, licenses, ratings, and bonuses. The point is still to relay as much information as users need, but the visual design helps reduce what otherwise might be a cluttered appearance into something streamlined and efficient.

“HTML” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Pitel

Building and maintaining online business systems is a skill, and which becomes much easier over time. Confusion and stress in the early stages are only natural, but development in this realm will quickly become second nature. Take what lessons you can from others, and adopt them into your pages. Be flexible and willing to try out new avenues if others fail. Keep these ideas in mind, and this part of your business could easily become one of the most rewarding.