Building web property – Websites as investment

Building web property
When the decision is made to set up a web site, you are doing more than putting a few pages on the Internet, you are actually building web property.  While the idea may sound strange at first, a little contemplation will quickly show you how a website could be compared to real estate, both in terms of a location, and as a piece of property with the potential to build value over time.

Any Internet domain can be thought of as a virtual building.  Some are single story constructions, with only one purpose in mind, while others contain multiple levels, or floors, and the focus of each is a little different than all of the others.  Single floor domains are the most common, with each domain containing a single focus, or storefront, and the pages contained on the site comprising various aisles or departments.  Other domains are similar to a shopping center, where a wide variety of businesses are centrally located, and each hopes to attract passersby inside, even though those people may not have been looking for that particular type of location when they entered the main site.

To make the association a little easier to grasp, think of a search engine as a sort of Internet phone book; a description that is almost uncannily accurate.  As such, each entry into the phone book contains the contact address, and a brief introduction to what is found at that location.  When a visitor clicks on the link, they essentially enter the domain, or building, and may begin to make use of the information, products, or services that are found there.  To further illustrate the comparison, web directories are like the blue pages, or yellow pages, where each one contains a list of contacts within a particular niche, often repeating the information that is found in the larger phone book, but making it available by a subject category, which hopefully makes the required information easier to find.

Think of designing your website as building web property, almost as though you were constructing a physical building on an empty lot, you’ll approach the idea with greater care towards what you design.  Quickly throwing together a set of pages with no real focus is tantamount to expecting customers to walk into a ramshackle building, with rain leaking through the roof, and wind whistling around gaps in the door and window frames.  Obviously, no physical business could hope to compete for customers in such a building, nor could building web property hope to attract quality visitors without providing them with a safe, comfortable environment.  In the same vein, a site built with attention to detail and focused on human appeal will grow in value over time, sometimes even becoming an industry landmark that people can refer to in conversation and be understood by others.  An excellent example of just such a landmark is the domain of amazon.com, which is a web property of phenomenal proportions, recognized online as well as offline as an iconic leader in their niches.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com