In Northern Ireland there are some possibilities, but it’s best to first understand that economic development agencies want to spend taxpayer’s (thats you and me!) money wisely.

Broadly,  if you are simply asking, “can I have some public money to help me set up a website?”, then the answer should be no. However, if you can show a business case or, have a sensible idea for starting a business, then the answer might be yes.  What that means is that your website has to considered within the context of your business. You need to have clear ideas about where your business is going, and how and why the website fits into that strategy.

First, business start-ups.

In Northern Ireland, a good starting point for anyone who is starting a business is the Start A Business Programme
What you should do is contact your local Enterprise Centre, who will have someone who can talk to you about the programme. Currently a grant of up to £400 is available at the end of the programme, which can be used (among other things) towards the cost of a website, but obviously, completion of the programme has to be your motive, and you shouldn’t view it soley as a way to get funding for a website.

Secondly, exitisting businesses

It’s possible that help towards a website might be available from InvestNI as part of a larger package. In general terms, if you have an idea for breaking into new markets, starting to export, or expanding your business is some way, it’s worth speaking to your client executive, if you already have one. If you havent dealt with InvestNI before, contact your regional office. You’ll find contact details on their website.

Conclusion

1. Some finanicial assistance might be available, but grant-chasing for its own sake is never a good idea. 
2. You need to see your website as part of your overall business strategy.

If you decide to use Solstice Business Systems Ltd to provide your website, it’s worth pointing out that I can help you with the broader business aspects, as well as the site design:

• Internet Marketing Strategy and its relation to your overall marketing strategy
• Internet, Email and Search Engine Marketing Services
• General IT advice and consultancy
• Technology Transfer advice and help
• Genral business consultancy

I have 20+ years experience in business and consultancy in N.Ireland, including working for LEDU as a client executive and technical adviser.  My primary objective, is not to sell you a website. My objective is to sell you advice or services which will  improve your business.

Overview
People (hopefully your customers) won’t be interested in your site unless the content is:

• interesting and relevant.
• accurate and up-to-date.
• well written (good English).

They won’t return to read it a second time unless it’s obvious that the content is regularly updated, and added to. It’s common to think of a website of a brochure - you create it, and then leave it alone for two or three years. That’s rarely a good approach. People’s perception of a website is more like a magazine than a brochure. If you pick a magazine which is 2 years old, your are much less likely to read it, or pay attention to what it says, than if its on the shelf in a newsagent. More and more websites are live and dynamic, with daily updates. 
Furthermore, all the above applies not just to your customers, but to search engines as well. So unless you have good content on your site, not only will your customers not read it, but they wont be able to find it!
Tips to improve your site content

• Relate the site to your marketing strategy.
• What are you trying to communicate?
  What do you want your customers to know? What do they want to know?
  Think of this as an unfolding and expanding story. If you business is to grow, so must its message to the world.
• Set up a schedule and manage it.
• Decide how many resources you can afford to spend on creating your site content, and create a schedule whereby it gets done weekly. This isn’t a technical issue: it’s a managerial issue. Make sure responsibility, authority and resources are properly planned and defined. It might as simple as saying to yourself, I will spend one hour each Friday doing it” or making it part of someone else’s job description, and making sure that editorial responsibility/authority is clear.
• Don’t forget about images as well as text.
• These could be photos, or perhaps charts or graphs, but as well the words on your site, you need to keep thinking about how else that information can be presented.
• Don’t be afraid to quote useful information from other sources (with their permission if required).
• Quote the source.
  Link to the source.
  Comment on the content. This is important - don’t just regurgitate and duplicate other content. Analyse it and add your on take on the subject.
  Make sure the source is reliable - and say why its reliable.
• Use experts.
• If you don’t have the time or expertise in-house, find someone else!
• Use a Content Management System.
• If you plan to edit or add content to your website this is a must. Passing content to your web developer every time you want your site updated, is expensive and far too much hassle.
  If you have multiple contributors and require sign-off before publication, you need a Content management System that has that functionality.
  Blog software (such as WordPress, which is what you are looking at now), is an alternative to having your whole website CMS enabled. It may well be that a portion of your site is static and the rest is dynamic. In that case a blog (you don’t have to call it that) is a great way to add content.
• Make it interactive.
• Once you get traffic to your site, involve it.
  Use polls and surveys, or questionnaires, to shape future content.
  Interactivity makes a site feel alive - it does something, especially if you respond to the contacts you get.
• Writing for the web.
• Style depends on your business/site. It can be formal or not, but the key thing is that the style is consistent. This is especially important if more than one person contributes the content. Either an editor will need to review everything, or make sure different styles are quoted and highlighted appropriately. For example you may hire an expert to write some content on a particular subject. You need to either edit that to make it read like the rest, or quote it as an article from your expert, in which the different style makes sense.
  Grammar and spelling are important.

The most difficult thing is getting started. You can spend a long time planning….what to write about, who do it, when to do it, what to write about it. Often the best thing to do it is not to dwell too long on these issues. Make a start aland let your approach evolve, but dont forgetto review and plan based on how it has gone so far.

That means it can be financially viable to spend money to “optimise” your website pages. And, it is possible, you can do things which will influence where they rank.

But let’s take a step back, and look at Google and Yahoo. What do they want to happen when someone does a search?

They want the results to be good quality and relevant to what the person searched for. They want:

1. Sites which are properly constructed and readable
2. Sites which target the region the searcher is in (geographically)
3. Sites which seem good because they are linked to by what seems to other “authoritative” sites 
4. Information which is obviously highly relevant to what you searched for.
5. Sites which have more than one page about the subject.
6. Sites which are up to date and frequently add new content.
7. Sites which have got some history 

They dont want the results to:

1. contain lots of pages from one site which have similar content
2. be full of spam
3. have results not relevant to your geographic region
4. have sites which tricked them in any way

There is a spectrum of Search Engine Optimisation activity. At one end is tricking search engines - making them think your site is more relevant or important than it really is. At the other end is doing exactly what Google wants - make your site more interesting, relevant, respected and continually update it.

If you are at the bottom end of the scale you will probably get short term good results, but get blacklisted eventually. At the very least you will have to keep changing your tactics, because the search engines will change theirs to weed you out.

At the other end, you are putting your trust totally in google or yahoo to agree that your site is good. You will have poor short term results. In the long term, if you keep doing it, and focus on good practice your site will succed.

A bit below the top of the scale is the zone where most “Search Engine Optimisation” work happens.  A good example of this is importance of backlinks. Google reckons that better sites are linked to by equally good and better sites. That, you would think is a fairly reasonable supposition, but because it gives weighting to this factor, webmasters aim to get as many good quality inbound links to their site as possible - simply because google rates it, not because it will be any use to customers or users of the site.  If your site is good other sites will naturally link to it, but why sit back and wait!

So the upshot is that it is seen at the moment as “white hat SEO” to seek good backlinks to your site - but a waste of time (and potentially damaging) to get links at any cost. What is a good link?…it could be a link from the website of a trade association you belong to, or a link from a well recognised regional directory. But the point about it is, that those are probably the sort of things you would do anyway, even if you weren’t interested in your google rank.

My view is that you should only do something to your site if makes some sense to do it anyway regardless of google and yahoo.

Further reading:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/

http://www.highrankings.com/linkpopularity.htm

If you are interested in marketing online, this is the sort of thing you need to get involved in - for 2 reasons:

1. As a direct marketplace - this is somehwere to meet supplieres and customers.
2. As an indirect marketing tool. This is a very good example of the sort of thing that is good for the popularity of your site. Its a chance to particpate in online communities, join networks, and get your name out there.

Many companies who try to get involved in Internet Marketing go down the route of typical search engine optimisation techniques, and do things like buy links to their site,  or create a blog,just for the sake of it.  Thats increasing ly sen to b ethe wrong way to do things. Good internet markeing pays good search engine dividends - what google and yahoo want are websites that are genuinely active and participating in relevant online communities.

Tradespace incorporates both an area to advertise, and a community area, which at the moment is a bit empty, but I’m sure will soon fill up.

BT tradeplace looks like it will be the sort of place to kill two birds with one stone! -If you have some time to kill over the Christmas holidays, get a free account.

How will it mess me up - why should I be concerned about this?

If you have lots of domain names pointing to the same site, the Google PR can end up being shared around each of them, so none of them rank very well. You want the PR to go to one domain name.
Google ranks local websites higher for local searches. One of the ways it knows you are a local website is if you have a local domain name, like .co.uk But that domain name has to be correctly associated to the website.

There are three scenarios to consider:

1. You already own a generic domain name like .com or .net (called a TLD) and you buy a new county code domain name like .co.uk or .ie (called a ccTLD) to get better rankings in your target geographic market.
2. You already own a ccTLD, but you want a more prestigious .com domain name to add to your stable.
3. You buy up various other domain names, which you like, or are similar to your main one, and you want them to point to your website.

How to manage the scenarios:

Scenario 1

What is required here is to park the ccTLD on the TLD and get a link using the ccTLD to an appropriate page on the TLD

Scenario 2

What is required here is to 301 redirect the TLD to the ccTLD

Scenario 3

What is required here is an IP funnel. This is a “feeder site” with a 301 redirect to the main site, with all the other domain names parked on the feeder site.
So if you own a website with more than one domain name its really important to manage the domains. following the guidelines above.

IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) of a website is not quite as  straightforward as you might imagine!

There are 2 main areas to consider:

Site Content

This is covered by copyright law. Copyright is automatic in the UK. Unlike some other forms of intellectual property right, you don’t have to apply for it and there’s no register of copyright holders. In practice, however, it can be difficult to enforce legally. It’s a good idea to mark your work with the international copyright symbol © followed by your name and the year of creation. We include this for you.

Its very easy for someone to copy the design of your website, and copy the content, including the images. In reality the biggest deterrent to someone copying your website is not the law, but Google. Google’s search engines will usually detect and not list (or list lower) duplicate (older) content.

If you use images on your website, you need to be sure you have the right to use them.  Taking images from another website is not legal, or fair. Images that we supply are sourced from stock image retailers and typically includes the non-exclusive rights to use the image on your website or printed media, but not the right to re-sell it. If you require otherwise, that can be arranged

Site Code 

If you pay to have a website developed, you will own any code that was specifically developed for you. That however leaves a lot of components of a functioning website that may be required to make it work, that you dont “own”. An example is the database software (typically MySQL) that may be used in connection with your site.

So for example if you use our site -builder tool, you will have not paid for code to be developed (which is why it is low-cost), so all you own is the site content.

Useful links

DTI advice on copyright

Advice on outsourced code 

Complete guide to IP (UK govt)

1. New clients will notice if dates on the site are old, or if there is irrelevant information. Fresh content rightly gives the impression that your are a live, active opertion.
2. Existing customers won’t revisit your site if the content never changes.  
3. One important fact is that Google rates sites higher if they change regularly. If you are interested in improving your sites performance is search engines, you need fresh content.

Ok, so new content is important. 
Why cant I just send you an email every few weeks and you update the site for me? Thats not a problem, that can be done, but obviously the time taken to do this it has to be invoiced to you, so there’s a cost.

Whats the alternative then?
A Content Management System (CMS) lets you log on to your own website and edit parts of it. Its easy to use, and you cant do any damage to the website, since it only lets you edit parts that are safe to edit.

How easy is it?
If you can use a simple word processor (see here), you can do it. You have a window where you create or edit text and format it. You can even add images and tables, just like in MS Word.

Whats the cost?
It costs £250 to add a CMS system to your site. If you having a new site built it’s also possible to have a CMS which lets you add new pages, which are then added to the menu system.
So if you anticipate at least one edit a month, a CMS system will pay for itself in months.

If you’re serious about using your website as a marketing tool, you should have a CMS system.

This is an area which can cause a lot of confusion, so I hope to simply things a bit.

There are two different starting points:

1. You currently can process credit card transactions - you have a “merchant account” and a PDQ machine.
2. You havent got a “merchant account” (and cant, or dont want to endure the delay of getting one)

If you have a merchant account you can either:

1. Use it with a standalone ”payment service provider” or PSP,or
2. Ask your bank or whoever your merchant account is with, if they provide PSP software. One advantage of using a standalone service is that if you ever move banks, it makes life easier.Examples of PSP’s are Protx and SecPay

If you havent got a merchant account, you need a “bureau service” which will provide you with a merchant account and PSP functionality.
You choices (in the UK) are:

• NetBanx Bureau
• Worldpay WorldDirect
• Paypal (and Paypal Pro)
• Chronopay
• NoChex
• Metacharge

How do you choose which one to use?

Here’s a checklist:

• Will it integrate with the software on your website (easily)..check with your website supplier/designer?
• Do you want to be able to send email payment requests?
• Do you also want to be able to take payments over the phone - some do and some dont?
• Do you want to be able to set up recurring payments?
• Cost. Check this free online tool to see which will suit your turnover and transaction value

Other points.

Paypal is very competitively priced, but some people are reluctant to use it because:

• It used to insist that customers become a member. Thats no longer the case, but some customers may not buy at your store because they think its still that way
• It’s closely associated with ebay and often perceived as only being a tool for ebay buyers and sellers
• Although it does allow non-members to make payment by credit card, it still tries to persuade buyers to sign up for an account by making the “pay by credit card” options less prominent. That may put some people off.

Make your own mind up!

Heres a useful glossary of terms: http://www.tecknapay.com/tecknapay-worldpay-how-it-works.htm