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October 2008
Website Basics
for your Small Business |
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| Most small businesses and individual practitioners can benefit from a well-designed, well-written website with attractive graphics. I'm asked about websites more than any other aspect of marketing by my clients and marketing group participants. While this topic could be a year-long course of study, here are a few basic things to consider when designing a new website for your business or revamping your existing one.
I'm assuming you already have your domain name. If not, you can check to see if a specific domain name is already registered by visiting the Network Solutions site or any of a number of other website hosting companies' sites.
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If you've missed any of my marketing newsletters, you can find them on my website. There you'll find valuable information like how to write your "elevator speech," tips on networking, elements of a basic marketing plan and much more. I also send out a monthly newsletter focusing on developing your creativity, and you'll find those on my website too.
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Remember Your Purpose
 The first thing to consider when you're planning your website is what you want it to do for you. Is it informational--in essence, a vitual brochure for your products/services? Do you want it to help establish you as an expert in your field? Are you going sell items on your site? The better you can define exactly what you want your site to do before you create it, the more effective your site will be.
Know Your Audience
The next thing to consider is your target market. Male, female or both? Interests? Age? Geographic location? Knowing your target audience can help you design a site that will appeal to your current/future clients and customers.
Using a Template vs. Designing from Scratch
Your website helps create your "brand" or the image of your business in the minds of your customers and prospects. It is the face you present to the world and your most important marketing investment. Spend the money to create a well-designed, attractive, user friendly site!
While you can use a template program from a hosting company (such as GoDaddy) to create a simple website, these can be very limited in design and changes may be difficult and costly. You'll gain much more flexibility with a custom site. Insist that the person creating your site make it easily editable with one of the content-management editing programs like Adobe Contribute. Purchasing a content management program like Contribute and learning to edit your site yourself will save you $85+/hour when you need to make changes or even add additional pages.
Use Relevant, Original Content
A well-designed website has more than just information about you and your products and services. It should also have information that your visitors can use--a massage therapist might have a page on the benefits of massage or massage for specific conditions like fibromyalgia, for example. Offering such free valuable information does three things:
- It gives you greater credibility.
- It improves your ranking on search engines.
- It increases the likelihood that people will return to your site and that they will forward links from your site to others.
Before we leave the subject of content, it's important to remember that all content on the Internet should be considered copyright protected. You cannot take copy, graphics or pictures from others' websites and place them on your own site. Graphics and Pictures
You can take your own digital pictures and load them onto your site, but here are things you should do first:
- Using a photo-editing program, clean up any cluttered backgrounds and crop the pictures appropriately. Using approximately the same size pictures throughout your site will help convey an organized, uniform look.
- "Optimize" your pictures by saving them in a smaller format. Strive for a size that is 50K or less. Your photo-editing software will allow you to do this. Very large photos take a lot of time to download and will make your site slow or even unresponsive.
If you don't have your own pictures, there are some great photography sites where you can buy images to use on your site for only a few dollars. Many of the photos I use in my newsletters and on my own and my clients' websites are from istock. Search Engine Optimization
Designing and writing copy for your site so that search engines will find you and rank you higher is called "search engine optimization" or SEO. The formulas that search engines like Google and Yahoo use to rank websites are kept secret by those companies. Here are some things that are known about the way search engines work:
- Your keywords (words that web surfers are likely to search on when looking for a site like yours) must also be used in the content on a page. The more often your keywords are used on the page, the better your ranking when someone searches on that term.
- The description of the page in your HTML code is a factor as is the title of your page (the name that displays in the browser bar when you are on a specific page).
- More content usually gives you a better ranking, but it must be relevant.
- Links from your site to other sites and to your site from other sites helps your ranking. Links from other sites are considered "votes" for your site by the search engines.
- Websites that have content that is changed often get better ranking than ones that are never changed.
Search engine optimization companies charge thousands of dollars to optimize your site, but you can do a lot to improve your site's ranking by educating yourself and taking the simple steps described above.
Consider a Blog
 If you write well and want to establish yourself as an authority on a topic, consider establishing a blog and linking to it from your site. This will help your search engine ranking and give you a much wider reach. Your Website is Never Finished
Your website should change as your business grows. Expanded content, new customer/client quotes, updated bios, pictures from your latest workshop, a link to a professional organization you've just joined--all of these help make your website the dynamic marketing tool you want it to be!
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Coming Next Month
To logo or not to logo; that is the question! Next month I'll cover the hallmarks of a good logo and what makes a good tagline.
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Need some Personal Help, Inspiration or Support?
In addition to my marketing services, I offer coaching for individuals who are interested in starting/building their businesses or who would like to explore new ways to rediscover their natural creativity. For more information, please call 760.436.8848 or visit my website.
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About Excoveries
Judy Balian and her Excoveries associates offer practical, cost-conscious marketing solutions for small businesses, consultants, holistic practitioners and inventors.
Our services include websites, marketing strategy, copywriting, brochures, business cards, press releases, articles, websites, newsletters and logo design.
Judy offers one-on-one confidence-building business coaching.
Judy also teaches classes and workshops designed to promote creativity and personal growth including The Artist's Way.
To contact Judy, email jbalian@excoveries.com or call 760.436.8848. |
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