Hiring a professional or doing it yourself, it’s important you take the time to build your small business website correctly the first time to avoid costly mistakes.

If you hire professional web designers and programmers to design your small business website, it will most likely be costly.  I personally dealt with many graphic and web designers when operating my marketing company.  I found that if you have a clear vision for your website design, a designer often has a very different concept.  Working together becomes a process of reaching the middle ground, a place where you’re both satisfied with the outcome.

Such differences means that there are unlimited choices for designing a website.  But at the end of the day there a some website design basics that have been proven to work best with customers and those that don’t work at all.

The Two Customers to Consider

There are two customers, the end user and the search engines.  When designing your site you need to think of the end user.  Why are they there?   Essentially they are there to get more information and to buy a product/service.  Your second ‘customer’ is the organic search engines, for without them you are going to have a lot less traffic.  While there are many other ways to promote your site, having your site optimized for the search engines, shouldn’t be overlooked.  Creating your site with both customers in mind, will enhance your business in the long term.

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Top Ten Steps for Web Design

• Small Business Web Design Tip #1 – Conduct keyword research

It’s important to pick the theme of you site, develop your business plan and financial before you jump into building a website.  Searching out high-demand, low-supply keywords to use in your website content, meta tags and links is how people find you.  Take the time to develop an ongoing list of keywords and selectively pick the best ones as the basis of your site.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #2 -  Analysis of your target market

Understanding what your niche customers want and need is important too.  Look at the competition’s websites and analyze how the top websites use design to capture their customers attention.  Simple is much better for search engines and the information hungry customer.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #3 – Develop a plan and site map first

If putting a small business website together yourself, make sure you use your top keywords as the heading and topic for each of your web pages.  Construct a layout/sitemap that clearly shows how each page is related in a simple flow chart.  This will really help you when you’re designing the website and your customers when they want to find something not displayed on your main navigation panel.

Business Plan Software

• Small Business Web Design Tip #4 – Creating a website design look

Creating headers, logo’s and all your graphics can take some time to put together and very little time to upload.  Armed with your business plan, keyword research and market research you’ll have a clearer picture of which website designs would suit your potential customers.  If you use a graphic designer make sure you talk over your ideas about what you both think your target market would want.  You need to be sure you’re on the same page.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #5 – Have easy to use navigation

Maneuvering through a site with dead ends and page layouts that keep changing is very frustrating.  Make sure that your customers are able to move through your site easily and find the information they are looking for. Keep all your page designs consistent and keep them simple.  If you make it difficult they will click away and never return.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #6 – Keep your website clean

Provide loads of space on your site.  You’ll notice Google’s home page is brilliantly simple in its design yet they are the biggest search engine in the market.  They keep their design simple so customers focus on the job at hand – searching!  Keeping it simple lets your customers focus on the most important part of your website – your content.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #7 – Write relevant content

Speak to your target market, not the whole market.  You cannot be all things to all people on the internet, otherwise your information will be too broad, not specific enough.  Define your target market in as much detail as possible when you develop your plan, this will make it much easier to direct your content to them.  Pack your content with loads of facts, figures or information that your target market is searching for.  This is the single most important aspect of any website.  You can take away your pictures and graphics, but if you take away words you won’t sell anything.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #8 – Add relevant and informative links

Link strategies help with rankings in Google, but that’s of secondary importance here.  If you focus on being content rich above search engine rankings you’re doing the right thing.  When designing your site it’s more important to be using your keywords to form relevant links within your site and use keyword rich link descriptions for your external links.  Make sure your keywords are relevant to the subject you are writing about.  This benefits your customers.

Tier 1 Pages

The Home page is tier 1 it has 10 to 15 navigation bars that are keywords and link to your Tier 2 pages.
Your home page, shouldn’t link to anything external to your site, only to internal Tier 2 pages, so visitors can find more information within your site instead of clicking away from you.

Tier 2 Pages

These are the pages where you expand on your 10 to 15 keywords and add your written content.  Once all content is added these form your Tier 2 pages.  Tier 2 pages are internal pages that link to Tier 3 pages.  They rarely link to outside websites.

Tier 3 Pages

Hope your following..

When creating Tier 2 pages you need to have links to other informative, keywords rich pages, these being your tier 3 pages.  Each page has it’s own keyword attached to it and Tier 3 pages are your highest income focused pages. This is where you’ll be directing visitors to your products and external links. These are the pages where you generate your income.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #9 – Keep your site updated

Add new content frequently and update well performing old pages with new relevant information.  This keeps your customers coming back and the search engines happy.

• Small Business Web Design Tip #10 – Be honest and trustworthy

Designing a small business website is about being there for your customers and being honest with them.  Being transparent with customers is a must.  Adding a privacy policy, About Us page and site map all help when it comes to being credible and trustworthy.  Always do what you say you will do. Answering emails promptly is a surefire way to gain credibility.

It is very important that you take time to design and build your website.  The aim of a website is to inform your customer to the point that they want to purchase.  Your site design must appear relevant to your industry.  It must be attractive, user friendly, content rich and informative.  People like to get online, read, purchase and leave. They don’t like to get sidetracked by irrelevant details, regardless of how appealing the site looks.

Below is a list of the top website design software packages available.  I have used all three and highly recommend SiteBuildIt!  It provides high quality support and useful reading materials and research tools to help you to build a high quality small business website.

Beginners – Intermediate – #1 Choice SiteBuildit! Key Evoy’s SBI  is designed with beginners and intermediates as the focal point. The time given to developing this software and to making it user friendly is exceptional. It’s very affordable and provides everything you need to get a website up and is highly ranked in search engines.  From zero to hero, this software has it.  It demonstrates, step-by-step, how to build a site and get it successfully promoted.  The manual that comes with it is worth the price of the software alone, its a must read for any internet entrepreneur. Ken Evoy’s Site Build It!

Intermediate – Advanced – #2 Choice XSitePro Also excellent software. It doesn’t provide the ‘hold your hand’ support that SBI does and that is reflected in the price. It’s designed for those who have more than a basic understanding of internet marketing. I personally have used SBI and today I use XSitePro, yet I still find myself returning to the SBI resources section now and then. If you have a minimal understanding about how to optimize a web page and create links then this software a better bet for you, and a little cheaper. Visit XSitePro

Advanced – Super Advanced – #3 Choice Adobe Dreamweaver This is professional software, the industry standard for professional website developers. It’s a  far more advanced piece of software than the other two as it requires that you to understand html design and implementation of a website.  It gives much more creative control, yet you start from scratch. The best website development tool around if you want amazing looking websites. However, there is a lot to read and understand even to master the basics. Find all current special offers on Adobe products.

Pre-Designed Website Templates

If you already have a knack for website design, then templates can be a much easier and faster option for getting up online. They are a great option for affordable small business web design.  With these sites all the graphic design has been completed for you.  However, you will need to either hire someone to assist you or you can purchase Dreamweaver and put it together yourself.

If you are going to hire someone, you should expect to pay substantially less for their work since they only really need to put the template together, add your navigation and your content.  Much easier than without the whole design element.  Here is the best looking template providers, TemplateMonster.  Their website provides excellent designs that are relatively easy to assemble.

Template Monster’s completed websites are very cost effective, but require using a professional to turn it into a functional website.  The advantage is that its still cheaper than doing it from scratch and you know the exact look and feel you will get after the professional has put it together. Visit Template Monster and get some ideas about design.

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Continue The Business Web Development Mini-Course – Step 3. Web content development

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