In a competitive economy, businesses are continually presented with advertising and marketing strategies from other companies. A major factor when deciding what type of promotional investment is suitable for your company has to be VALUE. This can be measured in circulation/visitor volume/design/impact, and most importantly, return on investment.

eCounties offers all businesses the opportunity to advertise their business in a well-designed, easy-to-use, cross-browser-compatible business directory with a difference.

All of the features below enable eCounties to stand out from the crowd. Many competitors avoid adding such feature-rich content, with few options to recoup investments.

eCounties operates a single administration charge for advertisers, with no hidden extras or monthly payments. Each administration charge gives the advertiser the opportunity to advertise for a period of up to twelve months, or to pull out.

eCounties provides a basic entry within our directory at no cost. This includes your company's name, full postal address, telephone number and the facility to receive consumer reviews. Make sure you ask your customers to add a review, and see the power of recommendation and networking.

Including the features from the basic entry, your company will benefit from a selection of advanced features, including:

Potential customers have the capacity to search for businesses by accreditations listed in our database. Accreditations that are not listed may be added on request. Additionally, your accreditations are prominently displayed on your profile.

A simple browsing facility, enabling potential customers to search for companies using A-Z listings.

Gold subscribers have the capacity to initiate a two-way link between trusted and preferred businesses, helping create more traffic for both parties.

Potential customers can search companies by name, location and categorisation (eg taxi or plumber).

eCounties understand businesses can fall into several categories. To maximise our clients' exposure, we provide the facility to list under more than one category. Gold subscribers are able to list their business under a total of five categories. These categories can be changed at your discretion, enabling you to test the potential exposure each category provides, without facing the steep costs of other directories.

To help consumers find the right businesses, we have developed our own internal review system that allows home users to rate and review businesses they have had experience with. To ensure reviews are genuine eCounties screens all submissions before they appear on the site.

With every county comes a vast array of organised events from school fetes to live bands, from county shows to charity runs. eCounties provides a portal to view current and upcoming events in your county. Listing an event is simple and is available to non-profit organisations at no cost.

With limited and costly avenues available for businesses to advertise job positions, the task of finding the right candidate can a hard one. eCounties provides its subscribers with a facility to advertise unlimited job positions for FREE. All job positions are listed in our easy to use job portal.

Gold advertisers are provided with a facility to advertise their products, services and menus on their profile. Now you can find out what a restaurant offers before you walk in the door or make sure the hardware store has what you need before you make the journey.

This service has been designed to highlight companies with female employees offering services that might otherwise make the female consumer feel uneasy. An example would be a taxi firm that employs female drivers, helping remove any worry about the journey home.

eCounties hand control of the advertisement to our customers. Every Gold subscriber is provided with a unique control panel, with a secure login from which you can edit text, and even replace your images, with an instant visible change to the consumer.

Throughout the development of eCounties, security has been a major concern. As the complexity of Internet applications increases, so does the potential for abuse.

eCounties offers several key defences to counter any abuse, including:

With the increasing numbers of browsers, web developers face multiple design challenges to ensure browsers display their sites as intended. eCounties has been developed to allow cross-browsers compatibility in Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Advertisers have just one twentieth of a second to impress the consumer with an Internet-based advert, according to a recent study by academics at Carleton University, Ottawa. eCounties delivers a fresh and visually appealing website, helping to ensure consumers stay interested long after the twentieth of a second is up.

eCounties continues to build upon its strong foundations, constantly increasing usability and enhancing functionality. Our Development Team always takes into account consumers' and advertisers' input, when making improvements and new features.

A major concern on a busy website is, "How can I be found?"

eCounties is designed to maximise the routes by which consumers can find our advertisers. With all the features discussed within this document, eCounties delivers one of the Internet's most powerfully interlinked websites. Please see the diagram below for an overview, highlighting our competitors' roads of exposure and our own.

With so many avenues open to increase search visibility, eCounties works continually to optimise our website. Our site has been developed to the highest standards, helping search engines crawl and index our pages. As an extra feature, we have included (for free, on both Silver and Gold levels) the facility to submit your own meta tags. These are keywords that search engines look for when indexing websites. eCounties invests money continually in premium adverts on major search engines, helping divert traffic into our site, thereby increasing our clients' exposure to the all-important consumer.

With our dedicated Marketing Team, we work with the local media to gain exposure. Our No1 goal is to ensure your site will be seen. Keep your eyes peeled, and ears pinned back, when each new county directory is launched. Extensive investment in advertising is made and reworked to ensure the eCounties buzz gets louder and louder.

Whilst covering the main promotional avenues such as the Internet and the Press, the eCounties Marketing Team also work with local authorities, registered charities, and private organisations to help promote the site.

Here are the key facts to help you calculate what amount of investment should return a better percentage of your original investment:

eCounties is passionate about our customers' return on investment. We are proud to give a unique service:

eCounties values our advertisers. We have worked hard to provide full documentation, including help documents, image-driven, designed to aid all users through the processes needed to manage your own content. There are video tutorials which guide you to create your own advert. We understand that our customers at times might prefer to speak with eCounties direct:

We hope that we have shown you why eCounties provides such a powerful business directory, and why we class ourselves as different. Should you still be doubtful, or believe other sites within the UK offer more for the same low cost (or lower), please contact us. If we agree with your findings, we will give your company twelve months' free advertising at the Gold level.