Launching a warship includes the ritual of busting a bottle of champagne against the hull. I often joke about doing the same when launching a new web presence. So instead of destroying Mark Thompson's computer I'm launching this post to celebrate the birth of ExcellenceInCeremonies.com.
Mark is a Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant. He became a celebrant to help people honor the milestones in their lives. He's been helping people celebrate for some time now. We met back in June during one of my live events, it was just a few weeks ago when he made the decision to work with me.
When I asked him why, he answered with a single keyword, "Velocity". Reflecting on his answer I realized just how far we've come from the days when we had to walk 5 miles uphill both ways to launch a business on the web. My first eCommerce project took 6 weeks. Now the process can be completed in 6 hours, even less in some cases.
As I write this post the US government is shutdown. That's no reason you should put your dream on hold. If you're ready to launch a business of your own, here's what you'll need to create a web presence for your business.
Internet Game Plan
"Which technology should I use?" is a great second question. Your first question should be, "What do I want to accomplish?" Mark had already defined his best customer, his market and his business model. He had a domain name and had opened a hosting account with BlueHost. He had written content and gathered together a few photos of his events. Here's what happened next.- We installed the WordPress blog and content management platform
- We created pages and added his carefully crafted content.
- Next we added his photos, organized his menu and created a branded email address: mark@excellenceinceremonies.com
- The development phase finished with Mark publishing his first blog post.