Small business website design - how do you choose what’s best value?

There’s no shortage of companies out there offering low cost website design for small or medium sized businesses. But how can you spot what’s best for your business? As well as the obvious factor of low cost, it’s important to work out exactly what you’re getting for your money - and whether it meets your needs.

There are a number of criteria you need to take into consideration. Here are the most important.

The cost of the website itself

It’s possible to find websites out there that cost next to nothing. They’re the ones that are made from cheap, basic templates. The problem is that they nearly always look exactly that - cheap and basic.

Alternatively, you could opt for a fully customised site. This takes a little longer and costs a whole lot more. Beyond the budget of many small businesses in most cases.

A good compromise is to go for a template site, but one where the design can still be personalised to some extent. Look for a small business website provider with a good variety of templates to choose from, and which has a track record of creating attractive, individual looking sites.

The cost of the hosting and content management

This is very important to bear in mind. Some small business website providers will include the cost of hosting in the design for the first few months. But do check what it will cost when your free period is up.

Others will have a straight monthly fee. That’s fine too. Though make sure you check out what it includes and what it doesn’t.

Whether it’s included or not, you’ll always need to pay some kind of hosting fee. But it’s essential to find out where you stand with content management. Will they add technical improvements to your site as time goes on? Will they charge you for them?

Most importantly, what if you want to change a page or add new ones? That great five or ten page website deal suddenly starts to look not so great if you’re going to be charged every time you want to change a page or add a new one.

The most cost-effective deals are generally those which give you your own content management system (CMS). If it’s a good company, your CMS will be easy to use and will let you upload copy and images in next to no time.

Not only will it save you the cost of paying to change content or upload a page, it will often be far quicker than if you had to brief someone and then check and amend their work.

Don’t pay for what you don’t need

Whatever website design and hosting you choose, beware of the company which is reluctant to tell you the cost upfront on their own website. They’re the ones who are likely to make last minute additions to the bill, or to try and get you to buy extras you don’t need when you contact them.

The classic extra is search engine optimization. This generally involves things like submitting your site to dozens of search engines plus various directories, adding a sitemap, generating a few backlinks and ‘optimize’ your various tags.

For that, you’ll often pay around a thousand dollars minimum (or here in the UK, anything from several hundred to well over a thousand pounds).

But you know what? You needn’t.

A good small business website design company will include things like a sitemap in the cost of your new website. They’ll also write the tags, or tell you what you need to write for the tags if you have a CMS. (Tags are of almost zero importance when it comes to optimization anyway.)

Other things, such as submitting your site to lots of different search engines just aren’t necessary. And still others, such as checking your ranking, are easy to do yourself.

The only thing that’s worth paying extra for with most small businesses is for a search engine optimization copywriter. That’s because the content of the site is the single most important factor in where it will rank on Google and the rest. Plus, you want your text to read well to potential customers.

Often, the best deals are to be found where you opt for both website design and optimized copy as a single package. It’s a service I offer myself, and it costs less than if you were to pay for the writing separately.

How search engine friendly will your new website be?

How Google-friendly is the design you’re thinking of buying? Is it well laid out and easy for customers (and search engine spiders) to navigate? Does it use search engine friendly coding? Is there a sitemap? (Sitemaps help visitors and search engines alike.) Is it compatible with all browsers and does it look good in all of them?

These are all factors in designing a successful website. Read the detail and check your prospective web designers are up to speed with them. Take a look at sites they’ve done for others. (What do you mean they don’t show sites they’ve done for other people? Why ever not…?)

Choosing a small business website design company - conclusion

For most small businesses, the success of their website with both customers and search engines is going to be crucial to the success of the business as a whole. There’s no shortage of small business website design companies out there to choose from, but be aware of what to look for and the pitfalls to avoid and your business will be halfway there. Good luck!

Chad

NotionDesignGroup.com

Why Small Business Owners Should Never Create Their Own Website

In this day and age, having a website is absolutely necessary for a business to compete effectively. More and more people are finding their way online. And more and more people are taking the time to visit your business’ website before deciding whether to visit the actual business itself. And this is no different for the small business owner. The main problem seems to be that unlike a bigger company, the small business owner often finds it necessary to create their website themselves. Big mistake!

Why You Shouldn’t Do It

To put it bluntly, you shouldn’t create your own website because you aren’t qualified to do so! If you have web design experience and are aware of all the different elements that go into a successful website, then I apologize. But that isn’t you, is it? You know your products or services like the back of your hand. You know your customers. But you don’t know the ins and outs of website creation. There are many fatal flaws that most amateurs make when creating their own website. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

It’s All About Perception

These days, your website is a direct reflection of your business. You wouldn’t draw people into your store and have everything just strewn here or there, dirty floors, and incompetent salespeople, would you? Of course you wouldn’t. And you shouldn’t have a sloppy and unprofessional website, either. Your website is often a prospective customer’s first contact with your business and if yours looks like crap and isn’t engaging, what does that say about your business? So many websites these days are completely self-indulgent. Full of “We’s” and “I’s”. Do you think your visitors would rather hear about you or how your business will benefit them?

Nobody Cares About You

I don’t say that to be mean. Only to point out that generally, people are interested in themselves and their own lives first. They don’t care about how great you are, or how long you’ve been in business. They care about how your product or service is going to make their lives better. Get the ego out of your websites, and you’ll be a lot closer to where you need to be.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is, your website is a reflection of your business. It needs to engage the visitor in such a way that they want to visit your business and spend money there. There are people whose specialty it is to do just that. You run your business the way you know how and let the pros handle your website. Then sit back and watch everything fall into place.

-Chad

NotionDesignGroup

Tips For Effective Internet Marketing

For those who want to boost site traffic and increase business profitability, a look at effective Internet marketing strategies is necessary. One of the things that should be prepared is the plan - a web promotion plan. The plan should include the design of the website to be used and the strategies to be used in presenting the contents and the products. Once the site has been built, it is time to promote the site online and make the site rank in many search engines.

This is where optimization campaigns will fit into the picture. Another suggestion for the interested merchant is to look at e-mail marketing in a positive way. E-mail marketing can be used to benefit the site. Just make sure that this kind of marketing should be handled responsibly. It is also important that the business dominates its marketing niche and this can be done in a number of ways. A business owner can do this with an affiliate or through the associate programs. If you are a newbie in Internet marketing and this is your first time to build and market a site, then it is suggested that you get the services of an SEO coach or an Internet marketing practitioner.

This individual can assess the status of your campaign and suggest means on how to improve your campaign. In order to build credibility online, it is also suggested that you do article marketing. Article marketing is the creation of contents and publishing these contents in content directories.

-Chad

NotionDesignGroup

Not All Web Browsers are Created Equal

You might not have given it much thought, but the browser your website is viewed on can completely change its appearance. Today there are two main types of browsers: Internet Explorer
and Firefox. The purpose of this week’s article is not to get you to change over to Firefox, listing about why it has tabbed browsing, blocks popups, and is generally more stable. No, today we will discuss how the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox affect your website.

If you haven’t recognized yet by the tone of this email, Internet Explorer 6 (IE 7 is getting better) is a curse on browsing the internet. Besides being a regular target for hackers and bugs, IE has a difficult time loading webpages the way they should be displayed. If you are designing a standard website with flat images you’re fine for the most part, but as soon as you start trying to work with transparent images, or arrangements of images that make your site look polished, Internet Explorer puts the caibosh on your dreams of layered images by filling in any transparent screen with an ugly gray box.

Also if you ever want to line up your site’s content using tables and you would like to left justify your content, sometimes IE doesn’t recognize this and centers all your content until you go into the code and figure it out. Firefox, on the other hand is great, it shows the page the way it was made to be seen, without silly images glitches and the like.

I know that many of you are saying to yourselves: “but hey! aren’t there are other browsers out there like Netscape or Safari?” Basically they are all falling in line with Firefox’s platform and are far less used than Firefox or IE. The stark facts remain, until Microsoft stops installing IE on applications of windows, we will continue to have cross-browser conflicts.
So what does that mean for you and your website? Not a heck of a lot, if you are a client of QT Web Designs - since we constantly check your website against defects on all current and past versions of major browsers and try to build your site in a way that is accessible and consistent for all. Contact us today if you would like us to see how your site works across several different browser platforms. If you are designing a site yourself, our best advice is to always preview your site on multiple browsers since you never know how it might translate.

Is Your Business Website Blinding Your Visitors?