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Sunshine Travel Club

On Community and the World Wide Web

With the downturn in the economic situation it seems to me that Florida and the community of Zephyrhills have been affected even more then most places. Running a small business has gotten more difficult in the last few years. As business owners, we all spend a lot of our time trying to come up with ways to attract more customers and increase sales. One of the "must have" tools is the World Wide Web (Internet). If you do not have a presence on the internet you may be missing a real opportunity to attract new customers. Many people use the internet to look up products and services to find what is available in our area. Once they find what they are looking for they will then head out to the place of businesses they found to make a purchase. What has stopped many of you from using this modern sales tool is the expense and technical difficulty of implementing a Web presence. I have found that if you look around a bit you can actually create and present a website quite simply and reasonably.

Once you have a website in place the second challenge is making sure as many people as possible find it and use it. To reach the thousands of residents and tourists that visit the area to advertise your website, the traditional method is through print advertising. It is your responsibility as the business owner or marketing manager to research each print publication properly to avoid a costly and ineffective choice and choose a publication that reaches the most eyes.  Another way that internet users find things is with search engines. They enter the item or service and their location into a search form and see what comes up. The results they get many times can be hundreds or thousands of things. So, as business owners we need to make sure we are listed in the results as one of the first 10 – 20 items! This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. There are many companies that will do this for you but again, they can be very pricey! I have discovered that business owners can do this themselves and it's nearly free! Let’s call it the "Community Connection." By placing links to other community websites on our own and having others link back to ours we can increase the ranking in the search engine results.

I propose that if we tighten up the Zephyrhills community through the internet we will all benefit. As a local business with a website I will link to your site for free if you will link back to mine. Let’s all just try harder to work together and keep our business community lively and strong. If you have questions or need more information regarding what I have proposed, please feel free to call me!

Website Proposal

Your business on the Internet Fast, Easy and Inexpensive

The Domain Registration Business Site 1st year fee is $7.99. Your domain could be www.yourcompany/organization.com and maybe currently available. The domain hosting fee is $4.99 per month for first 6 months then $9.99 per month after. All Domain work through 1 & 1 Internet (Registration and Hosting). They are the world's #1 web host, with over 7 million customers, 10 million domains, and 47,000 web servers! They have great prices on domains and web hosting, a superb 24/7 support team, top-notch security and reliability, and hosting plans with a wide range of included tools.

More Information about 1 & 1 can be seen at www.1and1.com

We can put together a simple 5-page website for you for just $200 total. This would include five pictures, location information and simple menu listing. Maintenance, which primarily means updates and changes, would be negotiable and is not included in the original development charge of $200.

You can have your own Website internet presence for $300 for the first year then just $120 per year after registration and site is up. You won’t need to do anything, we can do it all for you.

Let us know what you think about this proposal.

Thank you,

Rick Grambau
Sharon Cann

4739 Allen Road
Zephyrhills, FL 33541
813-782-6940

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