Top Tips For Small Business Web Site Design

Many companies spend thousands of pounds paying designers to develop their web site. These budgets are often beyond the reach of small businesses. This article provides tips for small business web site design to get fantastic results from simple and inexpensive design implementation.

Your website is like a shop window into your business. To entice potential customers to browse around, it has to have a structured look about it. To encourage them to stay and return, you have to present them with quality content. Purchases follow when the user trusts you and you have a compelling offer that solves their problem. All of this can be aided considerably with easy web design.

Your well organised web site tells the user that you are a professional and take care of your business. It's likely to install far more confidence than something that looks like it was put together in five minutes. If you take care of your web site, you will be perceived as being more likely to take care of your customers.

Good design starts with how your site looks. People don't read sites in the same way that they read books. Instead of taking time, they are looking to quickly skim through a site, pick up the required information, and move on. Thus it's essential that you present your content in an easy to digest manner.

For your site to have a good visual impact you should ensure,

• A high contrast between your text colour and your background. The greatest contrast you can achieve is black and white and, as black text on a white background is what most people are familiar with, this is also easiest on the users eyes.


• Font used is easy to read. This essentially comprises of two parts - the size of the font and the style. Don't make your font so small that it's difficult to read. For the same reason flamboyant styles should be avoided. The number of different styles used should be kept to a minimum.


• Use simple backgrounds. A plain background will allow the user to focus on what is on your site. Using busy or patterned backgrounds simply provides something to distract the visitor.


• Avoid clashing colours. Colours that are too different such as purple and yellow, or the use of lots of bold colours are generally hard on the eye. Visitors are likely to click away to a more visually pleasing site.


• Images and videos display correctly on the site. A page showing numerous empty boxes just looks tatty and clearly isn't showing your offering to its best potential.


• Pop up windows should be kept to a minimum, if used at all. Having something, totally unrequested, suddenly appear on the screen, is likely to annoy your visitor and therefore do more harm than good.

Good web site design isn't only about visual impact, but also about the feel of your site, i.e. how easy it is to find things and navigate around the site. This experience can be aided by providing,

• A consistent layout. For example, if a search box is in the top right hand corner of one page, it should be in the same position on all other pages.


• A logical menu structure. The main subject categories of the site should have their own menu heading. Related subjects should be found under the appropriate main heading.


• Good internal links. These will help the user to move quickly and easily to the information they are interested in.


• A sitemap. Here a user can get an immediate feel for what the site is all about and where things can be found. As the site grows in size, the presence of a sitemap becomes more important.

The final element of good web site design is your content, after all this is what your visitors are actually interested in. When presenting your content you should ensure it is,

• Quality content. It needs to be interesting, informative and relevant to the subject of your site in order to capture the interest of your visitor.


• Regularly updated. This will encourage your visitor to keep returning to your site.


• Presented in an easy to read format. Readers are looking for bite size chunks of information so, as well as complying with the points discussed above, you should ensure that your paragraphs are kept short. Where possible, bullet points should be used. This allows the users to quickly skim through, picking out the salient points.


• Use images correctly. Images should be used as they break up the space on the page and add to the visual experience. However, they need to be high quality and loaded with an image editing package which can reduce the file to a minimum size. Large files will simply take too long to load so you will risk losing the reader.


• Avoid music. Unless you have a music site, background music should be avoided. A sudden blast of music which then proceeds to loop is often unwanted and annoying. As such it detracts from the users' experience.

Finally, you should make sure your site conforms to the standards set out at www.w3.org and that it is compatible across the main web browsers. When you put all of the above into practice you should end up with a small business web site design which promotes your business to its best advantage giving you a fantastic business asset.

5 Costly Small Business Web Hosting Mistakes

As every small business startup or owner you are seriously thinking about cutting the costs. And one of the first things to look at when doing business online is web hosting.

You want to get top quality, but don't want to pay much. It makes sense given the fierce competition in web hosting space. However, there are numerous cases where people just lose money when they choose a bad host. So how do you make sure your small business hosting needs are satisfied? Well pay close attention to these 5 mistakes many startups makes when choosing a host. This may save you money in the long run:

1. Not Emailing Technical Support - Tech support is #1 priority when choosing a web host. You would assume that companies who do business make sure their support is top notch. Boy would you be surprised. Many times they don't respond or are lacking basic understanding. What will you do when you have a technical issue and need a quick fix? Always email the host and look at the response time. Good hosts reply within hours, sometimes minutes. Test their phone, live chat support, see what they know. Ask many questions, you need to test their expertise.

2. Not Checking How Long They've Been in Business - When you invest money in web hosting even for small business, you expect a good quality. But choosing a new company to work with is risky. They may be too small, run from a warehouse or garage. Or they may be heading for bankruptcy. If a web host can last longer than 3 or 5 years in the environment, they're pretty save to do business with. Check their domain age to make sure they are long enough in this business.

3. No Analyzing the Features - You have to plan this step ahead. What will be your requirements. What's your business plan and strategy. If you are thinking of making one presentation website for your clients, but doing business mostly offline, then you don't need much really. On the other hand what if you plan to make 10 websites a week with WordPress blogs. You later notice that your small business web host only allows 1 MySQL database per account. Ouch, you're busted. So plan ahead and carefully examine the features of a web host.

4. Falling for Review Sites - There are so many review sites around that it's hard to count. If you type in web hosting review into search engine, you'll get millions of results. No it's a good idea to look at some review sites, but you have to be careful. Most of these sites (99% to be correct) are there just to make money. So they'll promote anyone who pays them most. Do not blindly believe reviews you read from these sites. Check their Whois data, if they're hosting with a different host than their #1 recommended, then why should you even listen to them?

5. Jumping on "Unlimited" Bandwagon - Now more and more companies offer unlimited bandwidth and space. It means you can store unlimited number of files and also receive unlimited monthly traffic. However not always unlimited is really unlimited. Read their policies carefully. Some small business web hosting companies say unlimited, but actually put a limit on number of files you can store. In this case, it may be better going with the one that offers specific server space, than unlimited. If you're pumping 100,000's of small files to the server, then unlimited is usually not for you. Check with you host.

In Conclusion

I have shared just a few small business web hosting tips. But you may want to pay close attention to these. You don't want to invest hundreds of dollars into a web host to later find out that they're lacking small feature, which you desperately need.

And when you do get small business hosting, make sure you take full advantage of them. Use coupons and grab the chosen host for a year or two. If you've done proper research, you'll choose the right host. Most of them offer money back, so you're safe in the beginning anyway. But buying long-term hosting will always cost you less, sometimes 30%-50% less.

Website Content Development - 6 Secrets of Highly Magnetic SmallBusiness Web Sites

Website content development is often one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of developing successful small business web sites. A small business website built on a foundation of content marketing results in greater search engine referrals, better brand positioning, and more opportunities for relationship building with clients and prospects.

Here are 6 tips for building a highly magnetic small business web site; one that attracts thousands of highly targeted prospects, draws return visits from clients and customers and converts web traffic into revenues.

1. A Clear And Focused USP

A Unique Selling Proposition and a marketing communications strategy should be established for your business before you start developing your web content strategy. When web visitors come to your website, they need to know fairly quickly what your web site is ultimately about.

2. Personalized Content Positioning

Building trust online is one of the most difficult elements to master in your internet marketing plan. People who visit your website need to know that there is a person behind it that they can connect with, and hold accountable. Many business owners unwittingly bore their visitors away by copying the dull, personality-free copywriting of their competitors.

Have at least one person in your organization be the "voice" of your web site. That means your articles and your informational sections should represent a particular person, offer opinions and a feature a unique "voice".

3. Long-Tail Keyword Strategy

Long tail keywords are the 3, 4 or 5 word phrases that might be entered into the search engine inquiry boxes by web visitors seeking very specific information. A website built on a foundation of numerous "long-tail" keywords very quickly develops a strong traffic base that attracts highly targeted visitors.

You are likely to rank in the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages much earlier for these terms than for very broad (and highly competitive) keywords or keyword phrases.

4. Multimedia Content

Having a section of your site dedicated to podcast recordings and relevant video content is a great way to build engagement on your site and bring people coming back. You may want to store the actual files on a different server from your website or on a content sharing site (i.e. YouTube, iTunes) so that you do not affect the load times of your web pages.

5. An Email Series

Connecting an email contact form to your web site and following up with web visitors is the most reliable way to stimulate return visits. Since most internet visitors never go back even to websites that they bookmark, you should never take the risk of depending on visitors to remember your site.

Instead, create a complete system for motivating visitors to give you their contact information, develop an email contact (auto-responder) series to stay in touch and to invite them back to the resources of your website, including your products and services.

6. Visitor-Generated Website Content Development

Give your website visitors a way to send you feedback about your products, your services, and your content. Your website content development efforts will be in vain if you avoid interaction with your website visitors. Since people are quite voyeuristic, the most engaged visitors to your website will be as interested in what other visitors are saying as they will be in the content you share.

Most small business websites solve the challenge of creating interaction by creating a blog. However, the powerful small business website platform known as Site Build It! now includes an amazingly powerful module called Content 2.0. This module allows small business website owners to invite visitor feedback and add their feedback as search-engine indexable web pages. This means that the web visitors can now lend a big hand in creating website content.

Conclusion

By implementing these and other web content development strategies you will ensure that your website powerfully pre-sells your business to prospects and brands it to your clients, partners and market influencers.

Why Small Business Web Design Gets a Bad Name: Findability, Brandingand Content

Part 1: Findability The findability of most small business websites is so poor that the only prospects who ever make it to your site were probably already aware of your company and were searching specifically for you. Maybe they typed in the url off of your business card, or clicked your link in your email signature. This is good, but what about the mass of people who are searching for your products or services, who don't yet know that you exist? Will your website show up in their Google searches, Facebook combing, LinkedIn asking, or forum posting? How many times have you heard a business owner gripe over the lack of "results" that they have seen from their website? The problem is that results come from actually doing something on an ongoing basis, in a skilled way.

• search engine optimization


• online advertising


• Google AdWords


• social media marketing


• content development


• traditional advertising


• blogging


• link-building


• email marketing


• direct mail

These all need to work together from a big picture plan, down to the nitty-gritty, in order to have a truly findable website. Only then can you start to get down to the real nuts-and-bolts of what really works or doesn't work on the website. Moral of the story: don't bash a site until you're doing all of the right things to get people to the site. If you're getting traffic, and still no conversions, then you know you've really got an on-site issue.

Part 2: Branding

In Part 2, we will go over Branding, how many small business websites fail to execute it effectively, and what effect that has on the business. Firstly, what is branding? Branding is an umbrella term for the overall perception of your business. For our purposes, true branding is the sum of all of the intentional efforts that you make to portray a certain attitude, emotion, philosophy, or value about your business. This includes your logo, your brochures, the typefaces and colors that you use, how you answer the telephone, and of course, your website. Basically, your brand, and your website, is responsible to give the right vibes. How do you want your company to appear? Corporate? Friendly? Authoritative? Neighborhood beauty shop, or celebrity stylist? We'll come to you, or you come to us? You must have a clear and detailed answer to this question - an answer that is tied to your business goals. Then all of your website's visuals, interactions, copywriting, structure and functionality must follow suit. You might think that the most common problem with small business web design that fails to brand effectively is that they choose the wrong voice - that the website presents the wrong answer to the "Who are you?" question - a friendly, neighborhood family accountant coming off as an impersonal tax cruncher, for example.

While that is often the case, just as often the website looks almost totally unbranded. The small business website design is too often an afterthought executed in between the operational hubub of actually running the business. It gets tossed up onto the web without any inkling of the true personality of the organization, but instead looks templated, unprofessional, nondescript, and worst of all, forgettable. Let's say you're that neighborhood, family-values accountant - would you rather your receptionist answer the phone flatly, "XYZ Taxes." Or in a friendly tone, "Good Morning, XYZ Family Finance Consultants, how can we help ensure your family's financial comfort?" Which do you think your callers will remember? The Branding segment's answer to the question, "Why does small business web design get a bad name?" is this: Upon hearing your dull receptionist answer the phone forgettably, you should demand that he do better to represent your brand, or hire somebody who will. Just the same, while working with your online marketing company in developing your website, you should ensure that you ask the right questions. Once they've been answered completely, ensure that, based on those answers, your website is a clear and compelling representation of your brand's personality and purpose.

Part 3: Website Content

A big problem for small business websites is not having content that is well-written and structured. Once someone has found your website, you want to be able to grab their attention and tell them how they will benefit from using your services in a way that will hold their interest. There are 3 very important factors to the content on your website: Content Strategy In most cases, when a company wants a website built, the last thing they tend to think about is how relevant and interesting the content is to the visitors of their site. They fill the site with an overabundance of "fluff" that only serves the purpose of filling up the pages. This kind of content consists of vague and confusing statements which usually don't give the potential client a direct answer as to HOW they are going to serve them. This is indeed one of the failings in small business web design. This is where "Content Strategy" comes in.

This is the planning stage. You have to think about how relevant the content would be to your target audience and write about what you know they would care about most. Get to the heart of what you're offering, but if you need to get there through the side-door, do it. Find the middle ground between your readers' interests and your core offerings and value. When you have a clear Content Strategy, you have a plan for growth which is more than essential in small business web design. Your blog posts will all follow a relevant theme, your new pages will be on-point, even your email blasts will have a compass to your reader's clicks. Content Language When someone visits your site, they already have a certain goal in mind. When you've figured this out in your Content Strategy, you must then provide information that is straightforward, concise and if appropriate, entertaining. Web content is not like print content. People do not want to read brochure fluff. They expect to be spoken to directly in a conversational tone. They expect action-oriented copy that stays on point and serves them, not your business.

Further, when writing web content you need to quite literally choose your words. Having a strong search engine strategy in place will allow you to pepper every piece of content with keyword phrases that search engines will gobble up and serve to searchers on a silver platter (otherwise known as the first page of Google). Content Structure Structure your content so that the path to what your potential client is looking for could be easily found and acted upon. This includes both the internal structure of each content piece as well as the structure of your site's navigation. Time is of the essence, most people just move on if they can't find what they what and need right away. Have a clear path to relevant content based on what the user is currently viewing and how they got to you. Use bullet points, callouts, headlines, and get to the point quickly. Don't try to build up suspense in the first paragraph and hit them with a bang in the fourth, which happens quite a bit in small business web design. Hit them with relevant content in the first sentence. Content Should Be:

• to-the-point


• action-oriented


• easy to read (bullets, highlights, callouts, sidebars)


• clearly organized


• conversational


• SEO friendly

By having a well-written website with a well-planned content strategy, you could potentially increase the amount of business you are taking in. This will be due to your site being much more organized, interesting, visible and geared toward the customer's needs.

Summary

Pay close attention to the website findability, website branding, and website content of your small business web design and you will have a formula that even the flashiest websites that ignore these can't beat. Prospects will FIND you, prospects will RECOGNIZE you, and prospects will RESPECT you.

Choosing a Small Business Web Design Company

Choosing the right web design company can be a very tedious task. There are thousands of small business web design companies and some not even companies at all. Doing research is very important before choosing a web design company for your small business. Small businesses have unique challenges whether being a start up or a company operating already. Most companies have strict budgets and the last thing that business wants is to get taken for a ride and have to shell out more money than originally wanted. Good news for you business owners, I am about to give you some tips on choosing a small business web design company that is perfect for your company.

The first and maybe the most important thing is due diligence. Doing research on a company is critical before signing contracts or handing any money over. Do a quick Google search with the companies name as the keyword. If you are seeing positive results then that's a good thing. If you are seeing rip off reports, or complaint boards coming up that is a big negative. As a small business web design company owner I would never give money to a company that has negative listings on Google. There can be some exceptions to the rule but highly unlikely.

The second important tip is to look at the work that small business web Design Company has completed. Compare the portfolio with multiple companies. You will be able to see the difference between good design and bad design. If you take a look at the portfolio and it's not up to par then I would move on to the next company. The small business web design company portfolio speaks volumes for the creativity and cleanliness of the designs they can develop for your business.

Another great way to find the right small business web design company for you is calling and speaking to someone over the phone. If you are calling companies and never getting a response back from them or you are getting voice mails all the time that should raise a red flag. Submit an online quote request and see how fast they get back to you on business days. Our company responds within 24 hours to all quote requests submitted during the week, whether it is by email or phone. If the company is not responding quickly then that should give you a heads up on how they do business and I would stay clear of that company.

The last and final tip I can suggest to small business owners looking to have a small business web design company create their website is to use a design company that is located in the USA. Sure you can save a ton of money by farming your work to India, but think about it for a minute. In this day and age you get what you pay for. I have had tons of clients tell me that exact same thing and it's really true! Most of the work that is done overseas is very low quality design and development coding. Would you rather pay a little extra to get your small business website done properly or would you want to pay a small business web design company twice to fix or start over on the errors that happened by outsourcing your project. Another thing about using outside the USA companies is there policies can be very vague and if they disappear with your money you are out everything you spent and have nothing to show for it. At least with the USA laws you can try to collect from that company by contacting your local law enforcement or attorney general. Language barrier is also another key problem to using companies overseas.

If you follow the tips I have supplied in this article you will find that perfect small business web design company to help you achieve all your business goals and needs.

The Importance of Small Business Web Design

Small businesses have a lot to evaluate, but really the most important thing is attracting customers.

In a challenging economy, that can be much easier said than done. Try taking a step back and evaluating things from your customer's perspective. Customers have needs, and want to locate the places that meet that need as quickly as possible.

There's always the phone book, but there are questions that go along with the purchase. It'd be best to get answers without having to make several phone calls, and doing all that investigative work. So instead of the phone book, many customers will sit down at their computer and do an Internet search.

This is where quality small business web design comes into play. For a web site to be completely successful, it needs to be strong in three areas, all equally important. If one area is lacking, it could be detrimental for your web site.

First, you'll want your business to come up in searches, such as the example above. Otherwise the hard work sunk into other phases of the project is pointless. Your web site needs to work for you to attract new customers, and be search engine friendly. While it is impossible to directly predict or guarantee anything the search engines may do, there are plenty of things web designers and even the business owners can do to aid the site's chances of success in this area.

Next, the site also needs to be well-designed and inviting for customers. An attractive design will go a long way in keeping customers interested in your web site, and ultimately your brand. There also needs to be a clear navigational layout to the web site, so that customers can find their way around and get the information that they need.

Last, but still important, is a web site's written message. The message needs to be quick and clear. It needs to answer the original question that the customer came for. It needs to do this while being well written at the same time. Nothing will turn a customer away quicker than spelling or grammar errors.

Small business web design needs to strike a balance in all these areas in order to succeed, and a strong web site is one of the best marketing tools that a business can have right now to attract new customers.

Good Business Web Hosting Plan Is Not Necessary Expensive

Contrary to the belief that quality should come with extra cost, a good business web hosting plan need not necessarily be expensive. In fact, there are a lot of business web hosting plans that are excellent and yet very affordable. If you only know what to look for in a web host, you will definitely get the best deal.

While cost is one of the major considerations in choosing a hosting company, quality and performance should not be compromised. The benefits that a good business web host offers can never be equaled by any amount. In any business web site, it is very important to sell products and services directly through the site itself. Thus, eCommerce hosting solutions are important considerations in choosing a business hosting service as well.

Although a lot of businesses most often fail to see the importance of having the right business web host, most of them still prefer having a good hosting company for their business needs. Basically, small business web site hosting requires these standard features from its hosting provider.

First and foremost are powerful Linux or Windows servers that are grounded on reliable hardware and software. These are very important in making your web site work. Regardless of the fancy design and programming, if your site is not working, no one will be able to do business with you.

Second is 24/7 technical support. Even the best monitored servers even go astray at times. Thus when this happens, it is important that the hosting company is able to provide you with solutions fast. Whether it might just be for some errors that need to be corrected, or a more serious technical problem, a reliable hosting provider offers technical support around the clock including holidays.

On top of these standard features, a good business web hosting plan should be able to allow you to manage your web site yourself through the control panel that comes with the plan. With this set up, you can have access to virtually everything occurring on your web site and make suitable changes whenever necessary. Moreover, a web host should be able to back up your web site daily. Not all companies provide this feature, but this is essential for any business web site.

In addition, the hosting company should be able to provide your customers with security. The features and tools that you offer in your site should have the same level of security as that which gives you security through SSL certification.

More importantly, a good business web hosting plan should be able to save you a lot of money through affordable prices and even discount promos. The good news is there are actually a number of these hosting companies that offer affordable, qualitative, and excellent business hosting plans for small to medium sized businesses.