E-commerce is one of the few bright spots in the British economy, with figures reaching record highs last year. But many small businesses still lack an effective online presence. How can they get a slice of the action?

For many people in Britain, it's going to be an internet Christmas—again. According to consultants Capgemini, online sales hit £15.2bn between October 2006 and January 2007, up from £9.61bn the year before. The convenience of shopping from home and the wide choice available on the Web have won over millions of consumers. And in today's straitened economic times, more of them are likely to switch on their computers for bargains and better deals.

There can be little doubt that access to this "wired" marketplace is now a commercial imperative. But how does a smaller start-up company, strapped for cash and IT resources, get started? And how can it make sure its investment will pay off?

Any company about to set up a website should have a clear idea about what it's trying to achieve. Do you simply want to provide information on the business, to showcase products and services, or to go all the way and sell online? You should decide how the site will fit with the rest of your business, and how much effort you are able to put in. For example, work out whether you will need staff to answer customer enquiries and take orders.

Once you've decided what you will use your site for, decide what to call it. Whatever you choose, keep it short, simple and memorable. Think about how your online brand will reflect your offline brand identity. Decide whether you want to focus on the .com or .co.uk version of your Web address (but buy both to head off copycats), and then use it for your business e-mail too—few things are more amateurish than using free webmail as your contact e-mail address.

The work of building the website can be done in-house or by a specialist. If you choose the DIY approach, there are plenty of packages to help you. Mr Site is one. Microsoft Office Live Small Business also offers software aimed at getting small firms online quickly and easily.

If you are going to use a Web designer, always check out their previous work. Clearly define the job and get a fixed price for the whole project—and also bear in mind that once the site is live you may want tweaks and additions to it. The costs of these can rapidly mount up, so one option is to pay your developer a monthly retainer to help you to budget.

The price of external help varies, but a Web developer could charge you as little as £150 per day, so around £500 for a small website. Alternatively, if you feel more secure with a big brand name, BT will build a basic e-commerce website for you, within about three to six weeks, for £999 (plus VAT). A top-end, enterprise-class BT site, with all the bells and whistles (60 hours of development time), would set you back £3,099 (plus VAT). And you can always spend more, if you want.

Whatever construction and development option you choose, bear one thing in mind. A simple design is best. Consider how to provide information easily for visitors who may not know your company or products and who will not have the patience to dig. Be cautious about using animations as an introduction on home pages: this can be off-putting to many Web surfers, who will get impatient and go elsewhere. As Stuart Spice, director and co-founder of Mr Site, explains: "You've got about seven seconds to engage them, and after that they are gone."
Design the site so that visitors use important elements easily—make it clear how to search or to add something to the shopping basket and make contact details easily visible.

Of course, building the website is just the beginning. While it will be humans that will be buying your products it will be search engines, such as Google, that will help them find you in the first place. That means your site has to be attractive to both. Most people find what they are looking for through Google and few are willing to go further than the first page of results from their search—so being top of the list is key. As Keith Milsom, owner director of website www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk (see case study below), explains: "You can put up a lovely website that nobody is going to see. You need to think about what people are searching for on the Web and what words they would use to find you. Customers won't care how the site looks as long as it answers the question."

Decide on what search keywords matter to your business. Consider how—as a customer—you would find your own business online. If you do business in a particular town or region, make that one of your keywords. This might mean choosing "insurance" and "Cambridge", for example, rather than just "insurance".

You can also advertise online. One very popular way of doing this is to use Google Adwords. Choose some keywords that reflect your business and,  when "surfers" key them into Google, see your ad appear next to the search results. You can also target particular geographical areas. You are charged when someone clicks on your ad-the costs will vary according to the keywords you've chosen. But choose your Adwords with caution. If you make them too broad, you might attract lots of the "wrong sort" of people—ie. Web users who aren't at all interested in becoming your customers.

There are other ways of getting your site noticed, all of which come under the general heading of search engine optimisation (SEO). One SEO tip is to avoid using images to display important names, content, or links. Search engines find these hard to read. But not all of this is about what's on your website. Search engines rank websites partly by how many other sites link to them.

This means you need to be providing the sort of content that other sites will have an interest in. Keep your site regularly updated-perhaps via a blog detailing company news and product updates. This will give customers and search engines a reason to return.

As Spice explains: "If you create a website, you will get organic traffic after about eight weeks, but you have to be a bit more pro-active before you get real traffic. You need to get your networking hat on."

Consider how social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace could be used to boost awareness of your site, and encourage complementary sites and business partners to link to you. Investigate services such as BT Tradespace, which can also boost your visibility. If you have videos on your site (perhaps of your products) submit them to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. But beware: some types of SEO activities—for example, using text that search engine crawler programmes can see but is invisible to visitors—are frowned on by search engines and will lead to demotion from the ranking.

As Chris Barling, CEO of e-commerce software company Actinic, explains: "People try to trick Google, but it's very good at finding relevant sites. If you want your site to come out well, the best thing to do is pack it with relevant information. If you are going to get your website search engine optimised then find a consultant, just as you would any other type of consultant, by personal recommendation."

You also have to make sure that your site is performing as well as it can. Nine out of 10 online shoppers have problems with completing transactions.

This means you need to analyse how visitors are behaving on your website. There are several tools that do this, the best-known being the free Google Analytics, although there are other options, including buying software packages, if your requirements are complicated and specific. Google Analytics shows you how people find your site and navigate through it, and can help you find and correct obstacles.

For example, it can help you develop landing pages-entrance pages that have the information visitors are looking for. Other useful tools include alexa.com, which can help you rank your site's popularity against that of your rivals.

Once you have all the basics covered, it's a case of analysing your visitors' behaviour, making small changes to improve their "experience" and repeating that process again. As with any other route to market, you can't simply get it right and fix it forever—the website will need regular attention to keep you at the top of the rankings.

But as use of the Web is only going to increase, it's worth getting it right as soon as possible.

Case study

Who Anything Left-handed
What Uses software to learn more about online customer behaviour

Companies can learn much from the way consumers are using their sites, spotting the potential for new commercial opportunities.
Anything Left-handed specialises in products for left-handed people, from corkscrews to boomerangs. The company once had a bricks-and-mortar site in Soho but has now moved entirely online.

"My job now is to build, manage and run the website. A lot of it these days is Web 2.0—social networking, getting video on to YouTube and getting links coming back to boost our ranking," explains Keith Milsom, owner and director of the website.

Milsom uses Google Analytics to keep an eye on site performance, and regards the data on what visitors are searching for as useful, free market research: "One of the first things I do every day is get the reports of what people are looking for and the search terms, and we then adjust the site accordingly. We are always searching for new products to sell, and if we see they are looking for something we don't have, we'll go out and try to find it. Content is everything because that's what will get you in the search engine," says Milsom.