Hello all,

I'm a newbie here as you can see. Myself and some colleagues are about to set up a new site but want to make sure that we have covered all bases before we do so. In all honesty, we are all new to the process so and could do with some advice!

The site will be a commercial one and will hopefully generate some modest profits for us (through advertising etc). Can anyone offer us some start up advice that will help us along the way?

Thanks in advance

FTB

Do you know what software you're going to use on the website?

If you have little web development expierence you should consider using a CMS. Content Management System. Which will allow you to publish, edit, delete and manage content on your website. Some of the major players are Joomla, Drupal and PHPNuke. I would recommend wordpress. It's the simpliest to use of the lot and has a tonne and a half of helpfull plugins.
WordPress › Free Blog Tool and Weblog Platform
WordPress Plugin Database

As for designing the site....there are 1000's of free templates available. If none of you have expierence with developing sites then you could easily get someone to skin/modify a wordpress theme for a small fee


Advertising wise you should look at phpadsnew
Welcome to phpAdsNew / Open-source ad server
It's a program you install on your website which can rotate between adverts. It's very powerful and easy to setup. It's got a handy plugin for vbulletin. (if you're going to install a forum of course)
phpAdsNew Banner Ads integration (advertisements, classified ads, Adsense, etc.) - vBulletin.org Forum

Finances
Since there is a group of you, ye should consider some sort of financial mangement system. You can install mysledger on your website in order to monitor your finances. You should also consider setting up a specific bank a/c and use direct debit from each of your a/c's to fund the site. This bank a/c will fund the site and will hopefully ensure that everyone is paying their way. It's very easy to fall out over money when there is a large group of people.
SQL-Ledger Accounting

Although using sql-ledger might be a bit of over kill...it's important that your finances are managed. Maybe someone else can recommend an alternative?

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Apart from the good advice above from Rollo I would add:

I would research your competition.
1.Search for the business you will be in. (my preference Google)
2.Change your search phrase until you reckon you've hit the right search phrase - if you are targeting local (Ireland or region within ) then include that in your search phrase.
3.Look at the how many sites are advertising in paid search (good sign of how competitive your niche is). Look at how many pages of results actually are for what your looking for (low competition niches might have less than a couple of pages with results that are actually relevant, high competition niches might have thousands of real results).
4.Search for ":[search phrase]" to see who is targeting your niche.
5. Analyse the sites you find to see how they are structured and designed. Look for methods used to convert eyeballs to customers. Use their sites and take note of the features you find useful. Note the bad points also.
6.Learn from those already doing what you are trying to do.
7.Create as much publicity/buzz about what you are doing as possible because 'build it and they will come' does not apply.


Richard

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Research the market. See what other people are doing. If the niche is really obvious there maybe a valid reason why it hasn't been filled

Try and put together a business plan - even if it's only rough

How many staff will you need?

What about marketing costs?

PR?

Technology?

Payment processing?

Speak to an accountant and make sure that you've got it all sorted out properly - it's far too easy to get wrapped up in the "fun" and forget to dot the I's and cross the T's

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That's a very business orientated approach. It all depends on what your site is targetting of course. A web developer should be able to lay down the costs a bit better than an accountant for a website imo.

Cormac

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If, like so many failed .com's, you don't have a proper business model behind you you won't last.

It may seem like a harsh, cold business approach, but I've seen a lot of really good ideas go belly up due to lack of forethought. Look at the list of deleted .ie domains and you will see plenty of failed web businesses.

A developer can help you with costings in terms of getting it all setup, but if you haven't got the other parts of it worked out it can hurt later. If you want to sell advertising, for example, you may need to get yourself VAT registered..

Just my two cents

Michele - who just came from an Enterprise Board "do"

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I suppose it does no harm to get VAT-ified but it only applies if your business earns over 27K per annum

This might help you F2B if you wish to take the more formal route in setting up your web based business.

Revenue and Businesses - Starting a Business

I'd be more concerned about the devlopment aspect myself. It's pretty easy to set yourself as a business but to make business it's a lot harder.

Based on my own experience it can be too easy to get wrapped up in the day to day struggles and forget the big picture ....

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Thanks for the excellent replies guys. I'll take it all on board and get back to you again when I inevitably need more advice.

Thanks again,

FTB