Membership
Software
If you want to maintain
a list of the visitors to your site, to whom you can subsequently promote
your products, you will need some sort of list or membership software.
Many people are
reluctant to offer their email addresses and other contact information,
to avoid being bombarded with junk mail. One way of overcoming this
is to limit access to part of your site, so only "members"
can get in. For the typical small business this is not that wise, as
you really want to promote your business, not hide it.
An alternative way
is to offer to value additional added services available if users they
can give you their contact details. These might include: newsletter
or downloadable products. You must also ensure you have a high quality
site, and ensure you take account of the Data
Protection requirements.
If you want to take
the route of limiting your site to "members" only, a web developer
will have to use a database to collect the information and put security
measures into your site to allow access by password only. This additional
complexity may be expensive to implement, and may not be effective.
As a first step
we would recommend you use a service like the List Builder service from
Microsoft's bCentral
to give you a mechanism to collect contact information, and act as a
circulation list for a newsletter.
