People come to me every day and tell me they “have a great idea for an online business. Nobody has ever thought of it and it would make a really great website”.

I say “That is so exciting! What is your revenue model?” (Then I get £1 every time the answer goes like this…)

“Well… erm… we’re not really sure about that, just yet, but we’ve got all the design done and we hired an accountant…”

I AM GOING TO BE RICH!

More seriously though; I understand that the web is an extremely exciting, democratising medium, and so it should be. Business and entrepreneurialism has often been curbed or concentrated within social groups that have independent funds for investment, or the contacts to drum up private investment. An internet business can be born from little investment and in many ways this levels the playing field.

All this is for the better; however on the downside there is a lot of un-tempered enthusiasm regarding web business, combined with a lot of ego, legend and deliberate misinformation.  True, the web has been a goldmine for many, and many barriers to participation are broken down by this medium; but that does not mean that an online business plan should be any less thorough or intangible than a traditional business plan.

Please, don’t throw any more money away until you are aware of the following…

There could be a really good reason that nobody has ever done it before!

Something about the romanticism of the web; the way it connects people from across the globe and from all walks of life in realtime – makes some people lose all common sense. Just because the web can make something technically possible does not mean that it is useful.

I like to do a little old-skool sanity check when thinking about online business proposals. Imagine if you saw a card in a newsagent window, with this particular product, would you buy it then? Would anyone? Enough sales to make a business? Just because the web makes it easy to connect the people that make single plastic limbs, to the people that have amputee mannequins doesn’t mean you should.

TIP: Just over 30 million people in the UK are online. 90% of them search on Google. Use Google Keyword Tool, to find out how many searches a month there are for your product or idea, as an approximate and free barometer of public interest.

Build it. They will come.

This statement is a quote from one of the three or four-hundred Kevin Costner baseball films. In Field of Dreams, Costner is encouraged to build a baseball field (pitch? whatever?) so that dead baseball players will turn up to play there. (So if you’re still with me, the formula is… believe + build = dead baseball players.) A lot of people say this about the web. “Build it. They will come.” In my experience they are the same people.

Even if they are right – a handful of dead baseball players doth not an audience strategy make.

3. Have a Commercial Model from the Get-Go!

You wouldn’t put all your life savings into one investment account unless you had a fairly good indication of how it may return, right? So why would you invest often thousands of pounds into creating a website without any idea of how and when it might be profitable?

[Aside – Of course there are times when audience comes before business model, and that’s great if you’re VC funded or otherwise keeping food on the table. If your objective and desire is to create an online business, then your audience strategy and business strategy are inextricably linked.]

An exploration of the multitude of web business models is an enormous topic, and one I’m going to follow up with.  In the meantime, the most fundamental advice I can give is to establish and research your expected revenue per capita. Here’s a couple of ways to contribute to this.

• Use a specialist commercial web consultancy to assist you with your strategy
• Phone your competitors business development team and pretend you are interested in a partnership of some sort – see what you can glean
• Find any publicly listed web business with a similar business model and read their financial reports. It’s all there
• Transpose real-world learning’s to your online idea, subtracting the different costs of sale encountered here (site build, site hosting and maintenance, site development plans, traffic acquisition costs)

Before embarking on your online business venture I hope that you will consider and consult as much as possible before starting to invest. Our industry is still in its’ infancy and there are new developments, ideas and business launched every day, that revolutionise the way we shop, the way we find and listen to music or how we donate to charity. Its’ an exciting and evolving time, so do jump in with both feet. I mean both feet; a level head and a truck load of research.

1. Ensure your site will load without the ‘www’ prefix.

Ensure your .ht access file captures URL type-ins without the ‘www’. Unless ‘told’ otherwise, any URL entry should resolve to ‘www’ as a matter of course. Failure to make this simple change could result in users thinking that your site is down, broken, or over-capacity – none of which look particularly welcome or professional and mean you may have lost a potential customer.

2. Ensure your logo defaults to ‘home’.

When a function becomes a common convention; such as clicking on the website logo taking you to the homepage, this then feeds audience expectation. So much so, that we often use a website logo to go back to the home page rather than any other navigation convention, as the logo tends to be the biggest, brightest (and therefore quickest) single-click route home. It is essential to adopt this practise, as users may seek to re-orient themselves within your content, starting again from the homepage, if they do not find the content they sought on first attempt.

3. Clear and consistent navigable element

What good is all that excellent content, surrounded by beautiful ad modules if nobody can find it? Even if you get lots of traffic from search engines (have good Search Engine Optimisation) – you won’t be encouraging repeat visits or further tours through your content unless you have a clear primary navigation element which remains in the same place throughout the site. Best-practise sites nearly always have a horizontal primary navigation element, with second and third level navigation being on a left hand side menu. It is not compulsory to have your navigation like everyone else; the most important thing is consistency.

4. Clickable breadcrumb

A breadcrumb trail shows the user their path through your site and content. Many Content Management Systems will automatically generate a breadcrumb for you by picking up the page title and its position in the content hierarchy to display a simple trail. Additionally, if a user has arrived at a content page on your site via an external link or a web search, a quick glance at the breadcrumb gives the user an immediate picture of where they are and may encourage an extended visit if the original content was relevant and of interest.

5. Font size 12pt minimum or scalable

Web accessibility is the practise of making your website as accessible as possible to as many people, including those with physical impairment. Web accessibility is a considerable separate topic in itself, and as well as the legal and ethical obligations to ensure your website is as accessible to all as possible, there are very good business reasons to do so as well. If there is one single accessibility tip for increasing your revenue potential, it is to ensure your content is at least 12pt or can be scaled. According to the RNIB at least 2 million of the UK population are visually impaired, which is a significant consideration as a percentage of your customer base. Ensuring that your primary content is at least 12pt, preferably scaling larger, will ensure that you are not discounting this community.

7. Add a searchbox

Adding a searchbox is one of the single biggest wins for any website seeking to improve incremental revenues. If you are an e-commerce site (regardless of how simple and logical your navigation) users tend to favour a searchbox, rather than a directory, to find the product they seek. If you generate revenues from adverts on your content pages, adding a searchbox will allow you to surface relevant content more often. Again here, providing a free-text entry search box promotes a quicker route from intent, to content and the more relevant the content to the user query, the more relevant any ad or product content should be.

8. Searchbox look and feel

Regardless of whether your search box is a direct source of revenue (search results contain products or ads) or an indirect source of revenue (search results contain content pages with complementary advertising – therefore raising ad impressions), there are a set of look and feel practises to adhere to which promote greater and more successful use of the search facility.

• Make the searchbox a minimum of 26 characters wide (not high) and for e-commerce sites between 26 and 50   characters is optimal. Our Yahoo! experience tells us that bigger is better – as user queries become more sophisticated and ‘query string’ length increases

• Do not put any text (‘search here…’ ‘put your search here’ etc) in the searchbox as when scanning the page for the searchbox we tend to look for the ‘big white space’. Even allowing for the varying levels of user sophistication pre-filling a searchbox is definitely not necessary and may cause confusion

• Position your search box top right, or top and centre (close to primary navigation) both positions are a conventional best-practise and promote greater search engagement through ease of searchbox identification

Making these simple tweaks to your existing site, or ensuring that these usability foundations are an integral part of any new build, will ensure efficient revenue performance. Improving incremental revenue performance is a quick win and if you are lucky enough to attract hundreds of thousands of page impressions a month, such a win could be considerable. If you’re not on this scale yet, ensuring usable and efficient performance of your commercial website is an important part of getting you there!