Retail merchants face an immense challenge in today’s ultra competitive and fast changing business climate. Maintaining public recognition, drawing new customers, advertising, building customer lists, increasing sales, all of these are necessary just to survive - and doing them well is crucial to success.

There is so much competition today in retail sales that just keeping up is a tough challenge. If you want to forge ahead, you really have to be on your toes. Twenty or thirty years ago a small business could expect to do well simply by being in business and providing a reasonable product and service. As we all know those days are gone.

Marketing, demographics, targeting - these were once phrases reserved to business school graduates who went on to jobs with large corporations. But, as more and more corporations downsize these graduates are opening up small businesses of their own, and bringing with them the skills and the savvy of the corporate world.

As the cost of advertising, printing, and mailing continues to rise it becomes more imperative that retailers find more cost effective methods of growing their businesses. And you HAVE to grow. Today there is no more stability in owning your own business than there is in working for a major corporation.

The web offers an incredible opportunity to merchants who understand and utilize it correctly. Just consider some of the following advantages:

• You have a potential worldwide audience in excess of 100 million people.
• You have a new store that is open 24 hours a day 365 days a year. It can make sales, take orders, and take payment. It can generate qualified leads and help build a mailing or contact list of people who have already shown some interest in your product.
• You have an active full color advertising and marketing presence 24 hours a day 365 days a year that increases your name recognition.
• You can design multiple pages to target specific customers.

For those who don’t understand it - it can be an unmitigated disaster. Countless sites have been put on the web that are utterly ineffective. They don’t generate sales or leads. Why? Neither the designer nor the merchant understood how to utilize the web. It is different from other advertising media. The differences may be subtle, but they are real and they can have dramatic impact. If you are interested in more detailed information on these subjects and other issues central to effective web site design, you will find these ARTICLES useful.

Because there is NO other single media that can provide the same range of advantages to a retailer as a properly done web site, you stand to gain major and tangible benefits for your business. But ONLY if you understand all of the issues involved and your site design is based on the fundamental principles of WWW success.

As a simple example of one of the biggest mistakes that merchants make when putting a store on line, consider that there are currently over 100 MILLION pages on the web. How does any merchant’s site get found? How often have we heard that old adage about opening a business? The three most important things to consider are location, location and location! Putting up a site in a crowd of 100 million other sites without having a strategy to make yours stand out is an exercise in futility.

At WebWind Productions we have the knowledge and skills that are of paramount importance in establishing a powerful and commanding web presence for our clients. We offer a full complement of web site design services to merchants. Recognizing that companies are different in their needs and how they want those needs met, we offer these services in a menu format. You can choose whatever services will best meet your needs from our full-range menu.

We have a number of merchant plans available that include online shopping mall placement, group plans, affiliated businesses plans, and sponsor plans.

Whether your need is for a presence site, a site makeover, a marketing site, or a full-fledged online sales site we can make the difference in ensuring that your presence on the web is powerful and effective.

Like many of our clients, we are strong supporters of non-profit art and community service programs and we know that the Internet is an excellent vehicle for promoting these important institutions. In response to this, we have developed a Merchant Sponsor plan that benefits both the Merchant and the organization it sponsors.

This is truly a win-win situation for everybody. It is in keeping with the spirit of the Internet’s goal of making as much information as possible available to as many people as possible.