what i had learnt so far

sooon

for those of you that about to start a online biz would like to know this and this is just my many years of accumulative knowledge that i would use in near future if i ever start up a e-commerce biz. again i like to emphasize that there are all the ideas and lessons i had learnt from many talented people and i will not take any credit in any form. and here are the points:a good name for the company - sounds easy but it must capture attention. it has to be readable worldwide and simple enough to remember. personally i will make it have some or at least the philosophy of the business reflected in the name. try to avoid trendy name like mooogle or clickr(i mean no offends but this names were just poping up will i m typing. million apologies if co-incidentally  is your company name) because it will be history in 5 years time. try to make known in just ONE pronountiation. i m sure nobody wanted to have a company with 2 or more wrongly pronounced names and you just have to keep correcting your potential clients. taken from the movie "That Thing You Do", audiences just like to call the band "The-O-Ne-Ders" which the original intention is "The-One-Ders". then a good manager changed it to "The-Wanders". problem solved.a good domain name - again, sounds simple but just a little trick will make it better. 1. get a ".com". anyway, anyhow, get a ".com". 2. avoid using numbers or puntuations. I`m sure you don`t want to keep telling people the www.signup4u.com is not www.signupforyou.com nor www.signup4you.com or ...and the possibilities continues. 3. coined word is ok, but make it easy enough to guess. I had this experience that looking for a friend`s website and i just remembered it is called "Blue Carrot" or something. after zillions of spelling only found that the site is called "blucarot". how smart.a good tagline - well, most of us thought tagline is for consumers to feel cool or stylish. actually it mean more than what we think. learnt from masters(Thomas Gad, Guy Kawasaki,...), tagline should carry a mission for you, your employees, your suppliers, your contractors, your clients,...and the list go on. a good example is Nike`s,"just do it!", it means to the customer that sport is result oriented, and it means to marketing department as result oriented too. stop all the statistic analysis and just do it. your tagline not only motivate sales but motivate your design team, or your management team, or... to sum, it is basically your philosophy or meaning to start this company, and it have to change your life too. again, it has to be easy enough to remember. avoid using jargon that only PhD in Nano Economics will understand. remember, it`s for everybody.finally, a good logo to represent your company -  I don`t have a good reference how a good logo should look like, but I do have some guideline to follow: 1. start with black and white, always start doing your logo with black and white. do not let the colour confuse you with all form or design itself. when the form looks good, colours will come in easily. 2. less colour means less cost, i know these days digital print consider no colours as boundries but hey, there are a lot of occasion that you cannot use your digital print and most of the time that your supplier will charge per colour. how about that? and imagine your potential client had your beautiful leaflet and trying to photocopy to his friend. can you imagine how the colourful logo will look like?? of course, the advice above is to prepare your logo suitable for as many occasions as possible and can be conveniently duplicate from your faithful customers to your potential future customers. you can have special colourful designed logo for special event too like Children`s Day and so on. 3. less color means more flexy. imagine you want to have a 3d logo for signboard and your shop is in a street full of colourful signboards. trust me that you can easily tweak the colour and stand out from the rest, compare with colourful one, which first not easy to change the colour and i m sure it will somehow submerge or blend in.ok, I know there are so many more than this but at least for it will show solve some problems and hopefully make your new born business excel. thanks and ideas and critics are always welcome. Have a nice startup!sooon