All you need to know about Membership Websites

Membership websites are becoming increasingly popular as people learn of it's many benefits. They can be source of revenue but perhaps more importantly they can help you form and maintain relationships with your target audience. Which in turn will help you market your services and products more effectively.

Features of membership websites

Lets start by looking at some of the key features of a membership website:-

• User registration - The fundamental feature of any membership website is user registration, giving you a powerful commodity: an email address of a person who has expressed interest in what you have to offer.


• Protected access - A good membership website should also allow you to grant special privileges to your users such as access to specialised content like: Articles, E-books, Media, and Discussion boards.


• Paid subscription - If your website has something of interest to offer, you can charge your members to access the content. You can set up payment on a recurring basis or as a one-off.


• Security - By only allowing registered users to contribute to your website, (e.g. forums, posts, articles, uploads) you can easily identify any improper behaviour on your website. These members can then quickly be de-activated or removed.

By enabling customers to register through a website, you immediately create the facility to build an identifiable group of users that makes it easy to communicate with your customers and to market your services. Here are some of the benefits:-

• Newsletters: Keep your members informed of your latest offers, products and services.


• Statistics: With good statistics you can increase the usefulness of your website by tailoring it to your members' needs. Could be very useful for shopping based websites.


• Networking: Encourage users to create profiles with information about them to promote networking.


• Maintain expertise: By creating an area for like minded people you are creating a forum which feedbacks into your area of expertise.


• Opportunities: Opportunities will find you as your network increases in size.

Types of membership websites

• Content management based membership websites

There a choice of free (open source) and paid content management systems on the market. Each one must be weighed up carefully according to your needs. Some of the considerations that you should be taken into account are:

• How secure is it?


• Easy to maintain (add/update content and change settings?


• Is it user friendly?

Its possible to set-up and host your own membership based website but it is advised to use a web agency for the initial design and set-up. With further consideration to use them for hosting and ongoing maintenance.

• Bespoke membership websites

If you are offering a specialised service or you have a decent sized budget then a tailor made solution is always preferable.

Designing an attractive and user friendly website page by page can often be the key to enticing new users to join your membership based website...

To find out more about how your business can improve it's services through investing in Web solutions, contact Evucan Web solution for a free no obligations consultation.

• http://www.evucan.com/

To learn more, check out membership websites

Tags: target audience, shopping, relationships, commodity, discussion boards, profiles, e books, privileges, like minded people, cr, membership websites, membership website