Theres an early IBM advert I like which shows two failing businessmen leafing through an IBM brochure.

It says here the future of business is on the internet. We must get on the internet, says on to the other.

Why? comes back the question.

After some more leafing through the brochure theres a blank look and the reply: it doesnt say.

Taking your business to the internet should not be seeing as the panacea that will save a failing enterprise, but if youre serious about promoting who you are, what you do and how people can reach you then a website is a must.

With the internet used as the primary research tool for 98% of business sourcing and email as the defacto means of initial contact, not having a web presence is akin to still using carrier pigeons to communicate when everyone else is on normal mail. It may be quirky, those nearest you will know about you but youre unlikely to gain many new converts.

If youre ready to let the world know about you, you really need a website, but there are a few steps you need to take first.

1) Competitive Analysis

Surf around to see how your competitors are faring. What are the things you like on their sites? How easy is it to buy from them, and if not, what did they do wrong that you can avoid, too?

2) Ask others what they expect

Ask around your friends and family and on the web (chatrooms, forums, mailinglists) what people would expect from a shop selling your products.

3)Define your target group

Who do you want to reach specifically? This does not have to be one group, but can be many. You can at a later stage define different channels (microsites, other domains, other formats like newsletters or feeds) for each of them.

4)Are you planning to take on the world?

Think about internationalisation and localisation. Do you want to offer different languages? Do you want to ship worldwide? The former has a great impact on the visual design (German words are longer than English words), the latter on the billing system.

5)Think about delivery

What kind of checkout system do you want to implement? Do you only want to allow credit cards or also other means of payment? Do you want to implement a tracking system (Where is my order) to cut down on costly calls?

6)Clean up what you got

Make sure that you have your product data in a format that can be easily converted to a database (Excel, XML), the more logical your categories are, the easier it will be to maintain the shop.

Make sure you have the image material in a high quality format, and that the brand guidelines are available for the web designer.

7)What is your marketing strategy?

Think about the cross-marketing you want to do. Simply building an online shop is not enough, to attract customers you need to find them. Think about advertisement, partner programmes, newsletters or feeds.

Are there any partners you could cooperate with (portals, other web sites, products that add value to yours)?

8)Where will you move to?

Think about the server you will need, what database and traffic restrictions should it have? Do you need a secure section for transactions or do you ship that out to a third party? Do you need to connect several domains, and use virtual hosts? How much budget do you have for hosting?

9)Start writing your content

Start writing your content, make sure that the documents have a clean structure (headers, paragraphs, lists use the structure elements in Word rather than making them look like what they should be). Flag up text elements that are different from others by describing them (i.e. Each first paragraph on a page should be bolder than the others). This will make creating the style sheets (CSS) a lot easier later.

Remember that web users are not likely to read they scan pages with their eyes. Therefore KISS (Keep it straight and simple) is important. Keep sentences short, stick to one subject in each paragraph and dont over-elaborate.

Dont get cute with naming necessary elements. A shopping basket is a shopping basket, not your loot or stuff.

10) Think maintenance

After making sure the customers can find and buy your products, keep maintenance as one of your main concerns when it comes to technicalities of the site. Ensure that you are not overly dependent on a developer to add or delete sections of your shop this also includes not relying on graphical navigation (CSS can make navigations look dead sexy although they are text).