When you look at your website what do you see? A business card you are proud to direct your potential clients towards? A valuable platform which reliably sells all your products? A shaky place where you are either too scared or too technologically unsure to change anything for fear of erasing the internet? However you might view your website you may not have changed anything or have even touched it for a while. Time to act!
The best thing about online businesses compared to brick and mortar premises is that when you want to expand you don’t have to knock down walls, get planning permission or call in an architect. Your online presence can be boosted in a number of ways without too much hassle. With the rate at which online commerce is accelerating, if you want to keep up with your competition you need to be constantly evolving your website. Here are some things you should be thinking about…
Online Payment Service
Obviously Lancore knows a thing or two about online credit card processing. As well as having a host of other very useful online business tools which can massively increase the profitability of your website, Lancore is the perfect company to help you start taking credit card payments directly from your website. They take all the hassle out of taking payments and provide you with regular reports, full security and professional advice. Without this service you will be lagging way behind your competitors.
HTML 5
Upgrading your website to HTML 5 will open up video and audio to your visitors with ease. If you are currently operating in the older version of HTML you will have to ask your visitors to install a plug-in in order to play a video, but with HTML 5 visitors won’t have to do this. Being able to grab your visitors long enough for them to make a purchase should be your goal. Video is an excellent way of doing this. Look into it now…you know it makes sense.
Social Media
There is no escaping the social networking revolution. If you haven’t done so already it is important for you to start building a social brand now. Starbucks for example appreciates the erosion of trust felt between customers and big businesses over the last few years and has worked hard to focus its main advertising push through social networking. Facebook and Twitter are a good place to start. Remember: your company needs friends on both side of the business divide. Otherwise your payment gateways might end up with more cobwebs than a witch’s cauldron.

With the launch of new technologies such as the iPhone 4 and the iPad, it’s easy to forget that not so long ago there was a time when the most advanced technology in an office was the telephone: A simpler time when pen and paper, or maybe a typewriter, along with the postal service and a filing cabinet was the basis of all work and communication. A time when salesmen went out and about to do business on the road and when computers were closer to abacuses than today’s superfast nanotech marvels.
Browsing the web on a mobile has never been easier. There are more than 68 million mobile internet users worldwide and this number is growing. Since the development of Smartphones like the iPhone and Android platforms, getting online on your phone is an increasingly seamless and daily occurrence. Also, next year sees the launch of 4G internet. Much like the 3G internet currently used by mobile surfers but up to 20 times faster. With this in the pipeline you can be assured that mobile commerce is going to be a big part of the future of business.