One of the most important marketing activities for your small business can be it’s web site design and the content you fill it with. A well designed web site with great content can make or break your business on the internet. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get right, but if you do, the benefits will be amazing.

All over the internet you can see substandard small business web sites. As part of the small business person’s ‘do-it-yourself’ mindset, we tend to find a lot of homemade web sites that don’t sell their business. The money they save by doing it themselves can be costing them a 1000 times that in sales. A good web site can seem expensive when you first start out, but it really it’s worth its weight in sales.

Think of it as the sales brochure you have to use with every customer for the next two years! So when you shudder at paying a few thousand euros on a web site, think about how much you spend on a print run.

Now another major stumbling block of small business owners is hiring the right web designer. It’s a minefield out there but with some careful research the right person for the job can be found. However, once you have a web designer to make your web site look pretty, the next step is content. Content makes or breaks your web site and needs to be perfectly written to sell to your visitors.

If small business owners didn’t like paying for the web site design, paying for the content didn’t even cross their mind. The content and flow of your web site is just as important, if not more, than having a professional design. The attention span of your average internet user is about 2 seconds at this point. So get their attention and hold on to it for dear life!

So when it comes to your small business web site, get the design and content right if you want to have sales. A few simple changes can make all the difference to your web site’s performance. I do a free web site analysis and so do a lot of other people, so you really have no excuse not to start on the path of web site success.

There is a lot more than development and maintenance for your online web site to be successful. If you’re currently looking for a web site designer, you need to consider some very important aspects right from the outset. A web site needs careful planning and strategy to succeed so you need to start off on the right foot. That’s the big questions, what aspects does your web site need?

Great design
There are many talented web designers ready to make your web site successful. As long as you’ve spent some time on the internet and know what looks good and what doesn’t, you’d think it’d be hard to go wrong on this aspect. Though it’s surprisingly easy to get wrong. I know some very smart people that have stumbled on this first step and wasted a lot of money. However, the biggest mistake is trying to do it yourself and creating an amateurish looking web site that no one looks at.

Usability
Making your web site usable is not always as easy as it seems. It involves the correct positioning of items on a web page so the user can follow a logical flow to the result you want. If you want a sale, you need to lead the customer there. If you want them to contact you, you need to lead them there. But most importantly, you don’t want customers to get frustrated and leave your web site.

Findability
So now you have a professional looking web site that’s usable and all you have to do is attract some visitors. What’s the best way to get traffic? Search engines of course. We call this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and it involves making your pages just right for the search engines. Your customers type in keywords to find your web site. The trick is to rank well on the keywords they are typing in. And yes it can be a trick, a weaving of art and magic to do well in the search engines. But those in the know can do it consistently to ensure your web site gets exposure.

Combined with this are the many other marketing techniques that go along with your web site development. A web site is nothing if no one sees it, so you need an online marketing plan to make sure your web site is getting the attention it deserves. This should be the most important aspect of your web site maintenance contract. Your web site development company needs to keep marketing your company once the web site is up and running.

Functionality
You are developing your web site for a purpose and it is important to keep that purpose in mind throughout the entire development process. You’d be surprised how many people set out to design an online shop or ecommerce web site and end up forgetting to check if their web site actually sells products. With a web site, you have very little time to attract a visitors attention, wow them with your proposition, and collect their money. You need compelling sales writing to do this and like all of the above, you need to leave it in the hands of a professional.

The internet is the most competitive marketplace in the world. It’s not like a physical store where a customer has to travel to find your competition, a competitor is literally seconds away. You need to make sure all aspects of your web site work together to achieve your goal or you will find yourself another unsuccessful internet entrepreneur.

A final word of advice, it’s difficult to find a company that can handle the full spectrum of these skills and offer you the web site development abilities and online marketing you require. When I work with my clients, I take care of the search engine and functionality aspects and team up with a web site graphic designer to combine all our knowledge in to making the web site a success. And we’re always getting other input to make sure the web site we deliver is of excellent quality.

So be careful out there, the web site development industry is littered with false promises and propaganda. People that say the can do it all and fail miserably. Be smart with your money and your business’ future.

The bane of any web designer is trying to make their beautiful website cross compatible with all the different browsers out there. Of course, some don’t really care and say if you’re not using Internet Explorer at 1024*768 resolution you can take a long walk off a short plank.

But for the web designers that care, trying to have your website looking perfect in all browsers can become a little tricky, especially the more complicated your website becomes. With Firefox entering the market, no web designer can continue to hide behind the browser share statistics that used to heavily favour Internet Explorer. Firefox now has 35.4% of the market and has had over 25% for almost two years now.

Even with small market share, it can still impact your business. I’m currently working with a client whose target market is students. His current website has simple drop down menus, but they don’t work in Safari, making his website unusable. While it only has 1.6% of the market, most of that market will be students. My graphic designer uses a Mac, and a lot of young students do to.

As for browser resolution, believe it or not, people are still using 800*600. I was pitching to another client the other day and pulled up her current website to talk about it. Nicely designed website, but on her 800*600 resolution she had to scroll horizontally to see all the content. I don’t know how a web design company got away designing a website that looked crap on the paying clients computer, but that’s the industry unfortunately.

But I digress. I have to go fix my website in Firefox again, apparently some recent changes have broken it. The joy of browser compatibility.

Who would have thought you could get all your website design, optimisation, and promotion needs met from Spain. And in English as well. I tried London, but couldn’t stand the weather and so now I operate out of Madrid. Sure, it still gets cold in winter, but at least there’s daylight!

That’s one of my favourite things about working with the internet, you can do it from anywhere. And if you create a successful business, you should be able to run it from anywhere as well. If you want to live on a tropical island and have your office overlook the beach, it’s within your grasp. I’m not one of these ‘internet marketing gurus’ that claims it’s easy. It’s just like starting any other business and making it successful, but with more potential customers.

Anyway, back to what you came here for, some quick tips.

Your website design: keep it simple and usable.

Your website optimisation: focus each page on a particular keyword phrase and fill in the title, meta, h1, alt, p, and b tags for a start.

Your website promotion: submit articles, comment on blogs, post in forums. Then get creative and do something different!

There’s the world’s shortest guide to website design, optimisation, and promotion. Keep digging round my blog for more detailed information, it’s all over the place.

Your website needs four basic components to be built correctly before you start even thinking about getting fancy with Internet Marketing. I call them DUFF for short:

• Design
• Usability
• Findable
• Functionality

Design
If your website doesn’t look professional and trustworthy you can kiss customers money goodbye right from the start. If you can’t get this right, I’m never going to trust you to get a credit card processing system right! Fortunately there are a lot of web designers out there and this is where they excel. Don’t skimp on your web designer, I know you have a friend who can do it, but you need a professional.

Usability
This is the hidden component of design that often gets overlooked. Your website must be ordered in a nice, easy to follow and logical way. Menu systems should be abundant on your pages and easy to use. Every page has an objective, whether it’s to get you to the next page or complete a sale, make sure it’s fulfilling its objective. And make it fast to load, especially if you may have customers on dial-up, you’d be surprised how many that could be. Lots of text but graphics in moderation is the way to a healthy website.

Findable
To use the ancient Chinese proverb: “If you build a business in the forest but no-one is around to visit it, does it make a sale?” This is even truer of the internet and a critical factor. How will you get people to visit your website? Marketing! And one of your critical marketing actions should be making your website rank well in the search engines with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Once it’s there, it costs you very little to maintain and the traffic comes from people wanting to learn about and buy what you are selling. Traffic can also come from other marketing like Pay per Click (PPC) ads and Viral marketing, but SEO should be in every beginner’s bag.

Functionality
Does the website do its job, normally, sell your product? Whether you accept credit card payments online or have contact details on the website, are people buying your products? This is one of the most overlooked aspects of a website and a personal pet peeve of mine. As I said before, every page has an objective, and most of them should be leading the customer closer to the sale. Make sure you write a good website that people are compelled to buy from and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Once you get all these components sorted you can move on to actually marketing your website. We’ll talk tomorrow about some basic techniques to use. But remember, you should be starting with these four aspects or the visitors you attract will just as quickly leave your website.

The best idea for good website design that I can give you comes back to the age old idea of KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The style of your website design should be simple. The usability of your website should be simple. And the functionality of your website should be simple. Is my message simple enough?

Style
The average attention span of a web surfer is about a few seconds, unless you can grab their attention with something special. If they arrive at your website and find it looks complicated and confusing, another website is just a click away. So keep your design simple if you want them to read what you have to say.

A good website design is clear, uncluttered, and easy to read. Make your article headline stand out, make your navigation easy to find, don’t overwhelm the user with a million choices. We’ll talk about website objectives and flow in a second but the design should work to guide the visitor to where you want them to be.

Also, one of the biggest mistakes design-wise is to add too much technology to a page. Moving or flashing pictures, excessive use of technologies like Flash and Javascript, and other technology before design mistakes are all too common. Does it add to your users experience and make them more likely to buy what you’re selling?

Usability
While we’re on the topic of technology, don’t get carried away with your navigation menus. Remember, keep it simple! Your website should be easy to use and the information easily accessible. If people can’t find the information they want, they leave. Check out the MIT usability guide to see how your website measures up.

Test your websites usability on potential customers, on your friends, your family, your dog, the blind neighbour down the street. Seriously, blind people use the internet as well, can they buy your products and services? And they can’t be far off pre-approving dogs for credit cards either.

Functionality
Does your website achieve its objectives?
Are you selling products, services, or advertising?
And what is the outcome you want from a visitor to your website?

Whatever the objective, you want to make it as simple as possible for a visitor to reach that objective. If you can close the sale through your website in just 10 seconds, do it. No need for fancy tricks and the currently popular 69 page long sales letter. Design a flow through your website, see if visitors follow it. If they don’t, redesign it. If they do, see how you can improve it anyway! No one has a 100% conversion rate.

Unless you’re blogging for fun about how your dog just got pre-approved for a credit card, your website has a purpose. Make sure it fulfils that purpose.

So those are my ideas for good website design. Ignore them at your own peril. Embrace them and watch your website go far.

Amazing advancements have been made in making websites look pretty and one of them is Macromedia Flash. It’s been around a while but I’ve started to notice more designers start using it for things that are completely unnecessary. If you are thinking of using Flash you need to be aware of some major problems.

First, search engines don’t like Flash. They can’t get inside your menu system or look at any of your text. If you’re looking at never ranking in the search engines, Flash is definitely the way to go.

Secondly, some computers don’t have it installed. Especially work computers that need admin access to install new software like the one I’m using now. So if you want to lose customers because they can’t see your website, Flash is definitely for you.

Of course Flash has many wonderful applications as well but you need to be aware whether your making the right decision for your business. Using the latest technology for the hell of it is a losing strategy.

I’d always known about the need to start creating your business team and had actually done it in past ventures with good results. However it was taken to a whole other level yesterday when I met with a graphic designer for my website.

Her ideas where fantastic and the way she looked at my business was just so different to my point of view. I’ve never been a very visual person, I like things that look pretty, but as long as it’s not ugly I’m happy. But the things she showed me where just so elegant I was amazed. It took pretty and made it beautiful, sleek, and sophisticated. She’s coming back with ideas for my design today so hopefully, in a short while, you’ll see the difference it’ll make to my website.

Another example came from a lunch I had with a business friend. We like to catch up and share ideas about how we’re approaching problems, etc. He’s just started working with a retired marketer/graphic designer and the things she was producing were excellent. I guess we’re both quite technical people so the difference these visually creative people are making just blows my mind.

So start forming your team. Look in the right places and it can be less expensive than you think while adding incredible benefits.