Creating Your Web Pages

Why is having a Web site important for a Hispanic small business?

• As of February 2007, the Hispanic online market was BIG: 16.3 million.
• The Hispanic online market has sustained strong growth: more than 1.6 million new users between February 2006 and February 2007.
• It has been classified as an “upscale, mass market”: Online Hispanics are…
• More affluent
• More educated
• More acculturated than the aggregate Hispanic population
• This may indicate online Hispanics are more prone to shop because they are economically well-off.

Web sites are often the 1st point of contact for your business

• What kind of a first impression do you want to give?
• Often Web sites…
• have poor navigation
• overpower the actual message that is trying to be delivered
• look as though they were created by an amateur.
• A “bad” Web site will make potential customers question your business.

What makes a poor first impression?

• “Traditional” advertising:
• Forms that are photocopied to the point of un-readability
• Brochures that were obviously quickly created in black and white and copied many times on standard copy paper
• Business cards that have perforations around the edges
• Web sites:
• Poor quality pictures
• Links that don’t work
• Difficult to find information
• This is not the image you want to give to your customers.

How the Web works

• The address you type in to get a Web page is known as the URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
• http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/magazine/
• The URL is composed of 3 parts
• The Protocol
• http://
• The Domain Name
• www.hispanicbusiness.com
• The Pathname
• /magazine

• A Web page is written in a special code called HTML (hyper-text markup language)