Website!

Most entrepreneurs make the cardinal error of not getting a good website up and running. Having struggled through really amateurish versions of our website, it took us almost two years to come up with a professional looking website. Some helpful tips:
1. You don't need Flash: well not to begin with in any case. In fact, you don't need anything fancy at all. Some of the best websites are liked purely for their simple elegance.
2. Use existing templates: don't go looking around for neighbourhood developers to help you out. Well not at first. After a lot of mucking around, someone suggested using www.template-monster.com. We purchased our first template for 60 euros, and recently rehauled our website with a new template. The first time around, I took about a week struggling with the template, mangling it, adding content to it, until we had a much better looking website up and running. Then recently, we had one of our technical writers do the same to a much better looking template, and now the website looks even better.
3. Search engine optimization: this topic deserves a whole blog entry by itself if not an entire book. I can easily claim to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because our website figures well in search engine results. No matter how much effort you put into doing this is less. The returns are mind-blowing.
4. Content: the content on your website must be really well thought-out and properly organized. Don't just have content about how great your services are, but also put things which people would find useful - articles, papers, helpful hints, tools, etc. If you can put samples of your work online then do so. Don't worry about people stealing ideas or content and competing with you. They'll find enough of that elsewhere on the Internet in any case.
5. Alive: your website must be alive. Regular visitors will quickly notice if it hasn't been updated in a very long while, and soon it starts looking dull and boring. This is more so if you have a News & Events page, which should be updated constantly. We used to put even the littlest piece of news on this page during the first few months, when we didn't really have much to say. It just showed that as a company, we were still alive and kicking.