A course will be offered at the community engagement site at the Community Learning Campus giving business owners a chance to gain a presence on the World Wide Web.
The course will be a three-part hands-on opportunity for business owners to build their own websites beginning on Feb. 23. The second part of the course will be on March 2 and a third date has yet to be determined.
The information was made available on Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the Uptowne Olds committee.
Dean Owen, communications coordinator for the Olds Connected Communities Committee, told the group that the course will also give participants the information they need to find a good website developer for their business.
Owen said that a recent survey of 650 businesses in Olds found that more than 300 businesses had an old website and no social media while 232 had no web presence at all. Only 15 businesses had some form of online purchasing capability. Of the 112 businesses that could be considered to have functional websites, only 37 had been updated in the last two months. Only 13 of those 112 businesses were advertising on Facebook and seven on Twitter.
There were several different criteria that were measured, such as how often websites are updated, whether social media is available and how interactive the website is.
ìThey measured what they call search engine optimization where when you're searching Google Ö or any of those other search sites, how quick you pulled up and where you showed up in the page rankings. Not having a website is almost deadly,î he said, noting that a web presence today is akin to having a business card.
With the dawn of the Internet, Owen said advertising has now fragmented to several different types of media to get the best exposure.
ìWhat you have to do is you have to slice and dice your message and have multiple touch points to reach those people,î he said.
The OCCC was started over a year ago. It received about $320,000 in grant funding from the Rural Alberta Development Fund to bankroll its activities.
