Most small business owners want a website, but aren’t sure of how they’ll use it. Knowing the purpose of your business’s website is important to understand before you start building it or assign a budget to your project.

One type does not fit all

There are so many ways you can use your site. Most want a website to help promote and publicize their business. Some want it to function like a “Yellow Pages Directory Ad;” providing contact information. Some may want to use their website to sell their most popular products or services. Others may want to use their site as a customer service portal. Most, however want to use their web site as a brochure—and often don’t realize that there are many other options.

Brochures and more

A static brochure website functions like a printed brochure, sharing information about your business all day, every day. It usually features your products and services and a call to action. Additionally, you can offer free samples; white papers or valued added items that can help you convert your prospect into an interested customer.

This is a very simple type of site and if you don’t plan to update it too often, you probably won’t need a content management system (CMS) to help you change content, but it may mean that you pay your web developer to update your content for you. If you are somewhat computer savvy, using a CMS, you can keep your site’s information current and help you avoid the expense of content changes.

Avoid Flash

A couple of “web generations” ago businesses hoped to impress their customers with sites that use Flash. Many opened with a “splash” page which delayed the customer’s ability to see your products and services. It’s common that customers don’t want to wait and will abandon a Flash based site before they realize the full experience. With the use of iPhones that don’t support Flash, you may wish to avoid using Flash except to display small or embedded elements. There are many ways to use CSS (cascading style sheets) to provide motion on a page that may be preferable to Flash.

Add interactivity

Given the interactivity of the web today, you can have so much more than a static site. Adding interactivity, such as comments and product evaluations or ranking as well as social media connections to your site helps people know more about your business, creating a higher feeling of trust.

Use a content management system

A website that is active and updated often may produce better results in search engine rankings. Google favors fresh content and connections from various kinds of rich media (audio or podcasts and video.) If you want the best rankings in search engines, having fresh varied content is primary. So, you’ll need a CMS to manage your data. There are many Open Source platforms that provide CMS functionality. These include Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Usually one of these solutions is more than adequate for most small businesses. All allow for rich media, interactivity and easy updating.

E-commerce doesn’t equal a whole store

If you sell products as opposed to services, you may want an e-commerce website. Most small business owners don’t want or need a site with all the functionality of Amazon’s robust store, but there are ways to sell your business’s most sought after items. This is a good idea if you operate in a large geographic area. You can save them travel time while maintaining your relationship and get product evaluations too.  Selling a limited number of items using Google Checkout or PayPal provides inventory tracking, the capture of customer information and even a way to refund money should you ever need it. Integrating either solution into your website is simple. Both solutions function well for small business websites.

Be sociable

If social media is part of your marketing communications plan, you should link to your profiles, feature your Twitter stream and demonstrate your social media activity on the website. Let your customers find you on Twitter, LinkedIn or your business’s Facebook page. These communication channels allow customers to know your business in an informal way. Truly, we are all busy and customers don’t often have time to linger in the store getting to know you. With social media you can share your personality to support your brand.

Adding chat functionality into your site provides people an immediate way to contact you if you are online when they wish to talk with you. You can also add a Google Voice widget that connects directly with your business phone so that people coming to your site can make a connection easily and for free.

Free is good

If you have expertise in a particular area, you can provide e-books or white papers on topics that will develop credibility in the minds of your customers. You can also put downloadable value added coupons on your site to stimulate a buy now attitude.

Know your goals

Knowing your goals for the website lets your web developer make efficient use of their time and yours, choose the appropriate tool-set to implement your site, while achieving your business objectives.

At CBS Web Designs we’ve found ways manage website development costs. You can categorize website development much as one does at size classifications for cars:  Economy; Mid size; Full size. Knowing which size fits your business will help you get exactly what you need.

Our website design and development options allow for shared responsibility that helps control costs.

Our three levels are:

Fully Developed Solution: A website that includes

• Custom graphic site design supportive of your brand identity
• Search engine keyword rich site copy written for your site
• Professionally produced photography to illustrate your site
• Registration or listing in all major search engines
• Content management system

Collaboratively Developed Solution: A website that includes

• Custom graphic site design supportive of your brand identity
• Client supplied copy minimally edited by CBS
• Professional stock images to illustrate your site
• Registration or listing in all major search engines
• Content management system

Basic Solution: A website that includes

• Semi-custom graphic design built upon a commercially available template or framework; The template colors are coded to support your brand and your logo is added to the theme.
• Client provided website copy
• Client supplied photography
• Registration or listing in all major search engines
• Content management system

Our website design firm wishes to provide you with the greatest number of features at a reasonable cost. Understanding what you can afford and what will work well takes planning and preparation. We can help guide you through this “pre-design” work so that the design and installation of your site goes seamlessly.

**For more about how we work, please download this overview document.

“What does a website cost?” is the first question we often hear from someone in need of a new site for their business. Frequently the people who ask this question are those who are just starting their business and fear spending more than they can afford.

Our response is most always, “What do you want to accomplish?” This key question is the foundation of the development of a website for your business. As the business owner, you need to answer these basic questions:

• Who will be the primary audience for your website?
• What experience do you want your site’s users to have?
• What actions do you want your users to take?
• What level of interactivity you wish for your site? Will you provide them opportunity for feedback? Customer Service Chat? Downloading of white papers or instruction manuals?
• Who will produce the site’s copy / content?
• Where will the images come from to illustrate your site?
• How often will the site content be updated and who will do those updates?
• Who will maintain the site?

We use this questionnaire to help our clients in the development of their website. We find it focuses everyone’s thinking during the critical planning process.

Website templates abound, and while cheap and quick, they may not be the right tool for your business. You may spend far more time trying to cause one of them to fit your corporate identity than if you’d started from scratch.

But the bottom line is that you as a business owner must know is what resources you can allocate to the development of your web presence;  not only the dollars you allocate to pay for services, but the time you have available to be involved. Will you write copy? If so, expect to spend a very significant amount of time writing it. This takes time away from your business and may not be the best use of your resources. Do you want to take all the photos of your products or facility? If you want to do this, do you have the right equipment to produce the finest quality images that will represent your business well?

As with most designers and developers, CBS Web Designs works with you to provide as much of what you need and stay within your budget. However, you also must have realistic expectations. Ask other business owners whose websites you admire what they spent. Ask your CPA or business advisor or banker what they’ve seen as a typical expenditure for a business with your projections.

If you are writing a blog for your business, you need to stay focused on the goals you set when you decided to begin. Was it to demonstrate your firm’s experience and capabilities or was it to help search engine results by providing keyword rich posts that also demonstrate your businesses’ knowledge?

Hopefully the later is your goal. So here you are, committed or not to the blog and you are short of ideas. These ten ideas will help you write interesting blog posts even when your creative muse has gone on vacation.

1. Look to the news of the day; are there any major news items that impact some aspect of your businesses core competencies? If so, write about how and why. Google News has a robust search feature which allows you to hone in on your most significant keywords.
2. Look to your interactions with your clients. Did you have any “teachable moments” or interactions in the past few days that you feel are common and which, when shared, can provide learning opportunities? If yes, write about those moments; be sure to keep the names of those you mention and identifying comments discrete. You don’t want to embarrass your clients or yourself.
3. Write about some of the “basics” of your business. It is always good to refresh yourself on core competencies and share fresh insights as to why these basics are so important.
4. Write about management issues affecting your business. Each business has issues that are common to them all and often generalize to others in the industry.
5. Look to trends in your industry and analyze how one of them may affect clients in your industry.
6. If your blog is client facing, write about new developments that are sure to produce results for them. Tell why.
7. Invite another industry / sector expert to be a guest blogger. They can write about their insights into key issues in your industry.
8. Share a client success story (with permission of course.) Tell why they succeeded and if you were a part of that success, help readers see how and why the client succeeded.
9. Share a major learning experience; an Ah-ha moment. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be bullet proof…just healed. So say how and why you got insight that helped you redirect.
10. Share information about your colleagues or employees or even new staff member news, awards and competencies. I would even suggest having one of your employees write a guest post. Invite them to share some of their personality and talents they bring to working with you.

Have you noticed all the ads on television for Intuit’s simple website service? Can you "click, click" and build your website tonight?

What a great idea you think, why don't we do that? Whoa! Not so fast! Building a website can be accomplished with programs such as these, but ask yourself these questions:

1. Will a template selected from a group represent my business well?

2. Will it have my branding and approach to doing busienss or will I just have to go with what's there hoping that my branding fits?

3. Will it be easy to add on to as my company grows?

4. Will my website be compatible with mobile devices such as the iPhone?

5. Does my business own all the site graphics, design and content?

6. Will I be helped to understand what keywords, terms and tags will help position my firm in search engine results?

7. How can I be certain my site is registered with search directories, search engines and can be found by Google?

If you are unsure of how to answer any of these questions, you owe it to yourself to do a bit of research on what constitutes a good website, how to create strong keyword centered copy that properly describes your business and gets you found in search engine results. Yes, small businesses need to have a website, especially one that will be viewable on mobile devices.

Can you get a website that is a customized fit for your business without breaking your budget? Yes you can. There are many companies like CBS Web Designs in the greater Charleston area that can create a custom site for you that meets your business needs, doesn't break the bank and is done on time. In these days of realizing that local is the new green, support your local web design firm. It's just good business for you, your community and for your business.

A client recently noted that a large online publication’s advertising sales rep showed him the number of “clicks” his online ads were getting noting that the campaign was performing well. When the client reviewed his Google Analytics account, he could only attribute 30% of his incoming referrals to the advertising campaign. He called us to ask, “is my ad rep misstating my results?”

After a bit of investigation, we noted that his ads were being placed in many different places on the publication’s website. Only a small fraction of the referral traffic was attributable to the publication by name. Other traffic emanating from campaign ads came from other domains associated with the publication, but not carrying the publication’s primary domain name.

Google Analytics sets cookies that carry referrer details. This is how Google then reports the source of your campaign / website traffic. So, if you are placing online traffic, you need to be sure you understand exactly how your ads are being served and where. If there are other domains serving your ads, you need to know those domain names otherwise you won’t be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your ad’s referral traffic to your website.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool. It allows you to segregate, benchmark, analyze, and annotate. If you are using it to gain intelligence on how your website performs, you or your marketing staff may want to set aside time to understand more about how it works. You can watch video tutorials from Google Analytics here.
 

Recently Cheryl was a presenter to the Oakbrook Business Council of the Greater Dorchester Summerville Chamber of Commerce. Her presentation was about social media and how to use it to present your brand and reach customers.

The main point I made to those in attendance is that small business owners must understand what their brand is and must engage in some form of social media because that is where their customers are. Compelling stats from several sources allowed me to show precisely why.

Branding & Social Media is available for you to download.

You may use this presentation for your own information, and please link back to us if sharing.

CBS Web Designs recommends that all our clients have an easy to update website including a blog whose subject is your business expertise. While it's great to have a blog, it's best if it is not a free one from blogger or WordPress.com. Having your blog in your own domain means greater search results as well as the ability to demonstrate your business acumen and expertise.

In our development work, we use WordPress as it allows for very flexible integration between pages and posts (blog) and can be branded with your businesses' unique look and feel.

We also recommend that you update your website very regularly. I tell my clients that they must regularly update contents to achieve better results in  Google rankings.

In case you're wondering what other recommendations are important for you as a small business in 2010, this post in Small Business Trends is spot on.

If you have questions regardnig how to implement any of these items, give us a call. It's time your small business began benefiting from the 24/7 web.

While upgrading to Windows 7 I ran across a great tool for loading up all your favorite non-commercial software when reloading a system or setting up a new machine.

Web-based, it allows you to select all your favorite freely downloadable software packages and have them install with default settings minus the browser toolbars and extra junk you don't want, creating an install package you download and run on the machine you're setting up.

It currently installs sixty six different applications, including browsers, messaging, media, imaging, documents, security apps, run-times such as Flash and Java, file sharing, utilities, compression, and more.

It's smart enough to check your system's language settings and 64 bit support, automatically selecting the correct packages to install. There's even a place to request that your favorite app be added to the selections.

That's it! No fuss, no muss. Just start it and walk away and all that software gets loaded painlessly. What a great alternative to sitting in front of the computer, loading program after program to get a system configured as you like it.

Check out Ninite.