Building a Business Website
Step One -
First: your purpose?
Second: what to include?
Third: decide on the structure.
So You Want to Build a Business Website?
Here are some questions to consider
#1. What is your purpose?
- So people can find you
- To announce the services you offer
- To sell your products
- To increase your profits
- Contact info: email, phone number, address
- Services and plans
- Products and costs
- Highlights of your services
- Portfolio of you work
- Put most important stuff on front page: contact email, address, phone number, what you offer
- Why your product or service is the best
- Photos of your services or products
- Purpose
- All your services
- Home page
- About us
- Services or Products
- Our Purpose
- Contact
Keep your website pages simple...
Keep it simple, clean and plainly present your info - don't try for something cool:
- No unnecessary words, use short lines and bullet points
- Studies show people do not read webpages like printed material
- "Web text should be short, scannable, and approachable. Typically, you should write half as many words for the web as you would for print. If targeting a broad consumer audience that includes people with no or little education, it's better to aim at 25 percent of the print word-count. And in web writing, it's always best to start with the conclusion, so that people who read only the first line or two on a page still get the main point."
- Understand eye patterns - (think Z)
- Don't reinvent a new navigation idea
- Cross browser compatibility - Screen size and platform
- Your website must work on different screen sizes, including all mobile devices
- This requires a lot of work but is extremely important
Buying a domain name
Cost is around $40 per year - be careful where you buy it, there are a lot of scams. With your own domain name you can move where your webpage is stored at anytime. You can move it wherever and whenever you desire. We sell domain names, contact us for more info.
Website hosting
- $198 per year up
- Lots of choices, don't buy more than you need, you can always change
- Don't be tricked by cheap (including free) charges for websites and hosting, that will cost you more money in the long run
- We offer very high quality website hosting, contact us for more info.
- Don't even try it unless you are willing to spend lots of time working on your webpage
- Depends on how you build your page
- There are many tricks to improve your placing
- If you create you own logo, when you ask for people's opinions, be absolutely sure you ask people who will tell you the truth
- Neither creating a logo, nor finding someone that will tell you the truth about it, is easy to do