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Establishing a Web presence
Establishing a Web presence is not as difficult as you may think. In fact, here is a fast, two-step process to get you started right away
To begin with, you will need to decide what sort of Web presence you are looking for: a personal homepage or a corporate Web site? Depending on your answer, jump to the Personal or Corporate sections of this article.
Personal home pages
In this case you would typically put up your Web page on an existing Web site. This is fast, easy and will not require you to go through a domain name registration procedure. There are many locations on the World Wide Web (WWW), where you can host your own Web pages. Besides basic Web space, some also provide features like a home page creation tool, a utility to let you upload your pages or even edit them using your Web browser. How do they make their money? By selling advertisement banners and getting sponsorships.

Corporate Web sites
If you are setting up a Web site for your company, then you have formidable task lined up. As with most other activities, careful planning is a must. You need to think about the content and design; the kind of services you will provide.

Your Web identity
Once the Web site is designed, the next thing to do is establish a Domain Name, your site identity. A domain name is an Internet address that tells others where to find your Web site. Typically a domain name would be something like www.company-name.com. The primary advantage of a domain name is brand recognition. Because of the global nature of the Internet, the domain name (and the Web site) presents an opportunity for global recognition of your products and services. Ideally, your domain name should be your company's name or the brand name of your product or service.
Design issues
Now that we have looked at broader issues, let us look at the finer ones like Web site design.
1. Cut through the clutter….
There are millions of Web pages and hundreds of companies are offering similar service or products through them. Not surprisingly, it is the pages with the best design and services that attract the highest number of visitors. While a page with just text is boring, pages with too many graphics will take a longer time to arrive at the users computer. Naturally, such pages will attract fewer visitors.
Your site needs to have an attractive layout, colour and eye catching graphics to draw visitors. There should be a right balance of text and graphics on each page. Pages with lengthy text should be placed further down in the chain of pages, with a hypertext link in the opening pages. If there are many images on your site, you need to consider image file size. Images of the Compuserve GIF format for instance, are highly compressed, resulting in smaller file size. Though HTML is an internationally accepted language for developing Web pages, different Web browsers often display the same page differently. Thus, the pages on your site should be designed and created such that they look consistent irrespective of the browser used to view the page.
Static or dynamic?
Besides looks, you also need to consider whether you site should consist of just static pages or should it also include dynamic pages. As the names implies, static pages do not change unless you change them while dynamic pages are created on the fly based on the user's response.
Static pages display fixed information, that may be updated only when the site's manager chooses to. It could be general information about a company, it's services and products. Dynamic pages on the other hand present specific information that is tailored to a users requirements. Typically, such pages will have a search facility or some kind of form where you specify some details about yourself and what you are looking for. The resulting information is then displayed.
Though Dynamic pages are interesting, they are difficult to create and require lots of computing power. They are more expensive to create than static pages.
Multimedia
The Web is a flexible medium and can be used to deliver audio and video across the Net to your desktop.
This means, you can incorporate multimedia elements like sound or video clips and animation in your Web pages.
But multimedia files are large and take ages to download.
Corporate Web sites do not really require multimedia, (with the exception of the entertainment industry).
Will my visitors come back?
There is no guarantee!
While the process of establishing a Web presence may sound difficult, it really isn't. What is really difficult is enticing those finicky surfers to visit you again. And the only way to do so is by offering compelling content on your site that is fresh as dew.

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