Larkland Morley’s Professional Blog

Since I am a network and communications person, I would like to share some of the ideas I have for a small business to communicate effectively using very reliable and sophisticated modern facilities.

Domain Name:

Its good to have a proper domain name that reflects your business name. Good source

godaddy.com

Web hosting

You will need to host your website somewhere with good storage and reliability and great customer service – Best place

hostgator.com

Website Platform

While you may need a good e-commerce platform to sell products online directly, best practices nowadays for most business is to have a blog as the front end to the business. This can be structured in different ways based on your desires. The recommendation here is:

wordpress.org

This platform is free and you could also get it through your hostgator account, so its makes the installation much easier.

General E-mail

To communicate outside and inside your organization you will need some basic e-mail platform. Normally, the first thing that comes to mind is outlook e-mail platform, which means you need a server etc.. A very cool solution and I am sure there are many others is:

Google Apps – http://www.google.com/apps/

This allows you to setup e-mails on your domain name for both internal and external use. Its just as simple as using gmail but its coming from your own domain and would look much better to the outside world for corporate presence. I am sure there are others and in fact google is coming out with Google wave soon that would even help your internal communication much better.

Fax Communication

There are numerous services out there that will allow you to reliably send and receive faxes directly from your PC without moving. In some cases, you may need to have a scanner available to capture documents that needs signature etc. In any case in mostly you can send a document in PDF format through e-mail but its still good to have the fax option for traditional purposes. This is one I have tested and looks good so far.

http://www.maxemail.com/

There are many others out there.

Telephone

This is an area that has changed quite a bit with the advent of voip, now with a small business, you don’t need to have a major PBX installed. One option you have is to buy a small box that connects to your DSL connection but even that you may not need nowadays.

One cheap option to look at is Skype.com especially if your employees are not in the same location. You can buy accessories that will let skype behave just like a regular office phone and even wireless if you so desire. Skype also allows you to buy a payment plan and get a phone number for incoming calls. You could tie into your mobile phone such as Iphone or Android.

Otherwise, if you want a standard looking phone system, look into hosted PBX options. I am not in a position to recommend one over the other but I will list a few that looks interesting to pursue.

Here is a good place to look – http://www.voipreview.org/Business_Telephone_Systems/compare_business_voip_providers.aspx

Look at Google voice too, very interesting little tool especially when you are mobile.

Internet Access

To get all of these services to work well, at least not all of them since the webservice is running from a different server, you need a physical connection to your home or office. If your employees work from home then you need for each employee, at least to re-imburse for them using their personal connections.

Typical DSL is the preferred choice for this type of setup. Othewise maybe cable could be a good second.

Can’t recommend a provider as its dependent on where you are located. In the US, ATT would be the most common in most locations and in Canada, it would be bell.ca.

Coming very soon is the world of wireless 4G networks that will give you DSL speed pretty much anywhere but it will take about another 5 years to get full coverage at these speeds.

Social Communications

The next important step outside of using e-mail is how do you communicate with your audience effectively. The first step and almost an absolute requirement is a blog. The next tool to add into that would be twitter.com regardless of the audience type.

Now in terms of your client base, you may have to look into what medium is suited in terms of other tools. If your business is consumer based, then facebook.com is recommended, otherwise if its business/corporate oriented you could look at linkedin.com.

Other tools that could help your business are facilities such as google groups or yahoo groups. There are a lot of free social forum platforms that you could tie into your website especially for customer interaction as well. a good one to look at is ning.com

To close off, you may want to have a mailing tool to manage paying customer as well. The popular platform for this is aweber.com.

These tools used in the correct way can create the image of a powerful organization since you are pretty much on par with larger companies at very minimal cost.