Website Design for Your Home Business

First determine what marketing information your prospects need. What combination of information is needed to turn leads into prospects, and then prospects into customers? Basically, you need to display quick and enticing overview information, an easy way to get at more detailed information, and an easy way to purchase the product or service.

Navigation: Keep it simple (KISS), and make sure it's consistent from page to page. No matter where you place your menu bar -- either at the top or down the side--always include a small text menu at the bottom of every page. If you're one of those people easily impressed with Flash, don't design your navigation with it. There are still some people who don't have or want the plug-in, so they they won't be able to navigate your site. Besides, search engine spiders can't read it, so won't be able to spider the individual pages of your site if the navigation is done in Flash.

The basic process of creating  Web pages includes: gathering the information to be included in the web site; adding web code to change existing material into html documents; modifying this html code for best Web viewing; scanning photos and illustrations into jpg or gif image files; adding hypertext links to html pages; uploading the pages to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) with an FTP program; and ongoing testing and updating of pages and links.

Privacy Policy: With all of the concern over privacy on the Web if you collect any type of information from your visitors (even if it's just an email address) you need to include a privacy policy. There are many online templates that will help you to create one easily. Once made, post a link to it on every page of your site.

On the very first page of your site (the homepage) the first paragraph should answer the "5 W's"; basically telling them who you are and what you're offering. You'd be amazed at the number of web sites that leave this out; making me think "what do these people do, and what's in it for me?" You need to answer these questions and do it fast. Surfers are a very impatient group. Stop them before they click away.

Your site should be well organized, so that it is easy for your prospects to navigate your site (find what they are looking for easily and intuitively.) A confusing navigational system will cause you to lose valuable visitors.  Take the time to create an overview flow chart of your site to maintain ease of navigation as you develop web pages and expand the site.

Consistency of appearance from page to page makes the site uniform and professional. To maintain uniformity of appearance, use no more than 2 font type faces throughout. Keep the paragraphs left justified for ease of reading. For ease of reading, avoid using capital letters in page headings (except for the first letter of the heading.)

We suggest that you design the pages to be viewable in a 800 X 640 screen size, the most common size viewing screen currently. 

After the flow chart, you can start creating the web pages. We use Microsoft Frontpage 2000 to design each page's layout and arrange the text and graphic layout. Take a course at a local college or learn how to use it on your own. The following is an excellent tutorial: Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours

Designing Web Usability  covers writing for the Web, multimedia, navigation strategy, search boxes, accessibility for disabled users, and international considerations.

Web Style Guide begins with a discussion of the overall process of defining the objectives and users of your Web site, as well as the goals to measure your progress.

Web Design in a Nutshell covers every aspect of designing Web pages; furnishes quick and easy access to a vast array of technologies and techniques needed for effective Web design.

Add some graphic images to your pages, be creative and make your pages pleasant to look at, but be aware that it takes time to load graphic images. Load time is very important because visitors won't wait more than 10 to 15 seconds for your pages to load. You could be losing valuable visitors with a slow-loading website. If your page takes too long to load, you will definitely lose traffic to your site.

Here are some free graphics sites: Animation Factory, Net Matrix, Best of Web, IconBAZAAR, Backgrounds, XOOM gifs, The Free Site, GIF Wizard, 321clipart, Images and Icons, MediaBuilder Home Page, Dreamscape, Successful banners, Webspice, Web Developers Journal

Some animated graphics sites: Animation Factory, animation library, buchner, rogers gifs, clipart guide, animation creations

To minimize the time to load images, use Gif Wizard to compress the size of the images. Gif Wizard is an indispensible tool for site design and maintenance.  Gif Wizard will not only optimize all your graphics so your pages load quickly but will also make sure all your links are working.

Contact Information: Nothing drives me more insane than having to search through an entire web site just to send the owner an email. Post your contact info at the bottom of every page of your site, along with your email address. Don't make me fill out a whole form when I just want to send a simple comment. Include your email address, hotlinked and ready to go.

A continuous theme, concept or idea should tie your whole site together. Your homepage (index.htm) should not have a myriad of disjointed ideas, concepts, or programs - things that have absolutely nothing to do with the main focus of your website. All  of your pages should be related to one common topic or subject.

Most visitors will come to your site for one reason only -- the reason that you advertised to get them there! Don't confuse them by having unrelated content on your website (unless it is comic relief - some sort of entertainment or amusement) or you'll be sure to turn them away. 

The content value is how valuable the information on your site is to your visitors. A high content value means that your site is very informative, has fresh, updated, and original information, and gives your visitors a reason to come back. 

To increase the value to your site, consider adding free information that educates as well as sells. This educational material should  complement the sales-oriented  content. The educational content  builds a picture in the client's eyes of a business that can offer knowledge, support and solutions as well as merely product.

Each browser ie. AOL, Netscape, and Internet Explorer will display your site pages differently, so it is important to check these differences and perhaps make design adjustments. Using these 3 browsers to check your site will cover the majority of your clients. You can download both Netscape and IE onto your PC for free and simply subscribe to AOL. From your own PC, take a look at your site  using each different browser. This very important test will tell you if your website is being viewed properly in all of the major browsers. One small error that would be overlooked by Microsoft's browser can cause Netscape's browser not to even display your pages!

Spelling should be checked and text should be proofread for grammar mistakes. The majority of Internet users are well educated and will tend to judge the value of your site's information based on language skills. You can help to eliminate this problem by asking one of your  colleagues or friends with a good command of the language to proofread your site for errors.

If you're going to have a web site, you need to offer a newsletter. You need to start collecting a list of your visitors' email addresses so you can keep in touch with them. Ezines help to keep your site fresh in the client's mind and helps to establish trust and credibility.

When on-line consumers find a product they like, they usually want to move from high-tech to high touch.  Sometimes you'll receive e-mail and sometimes a phone call. Either way, you must respond to these questions quickly and intelligently, at least within 24 hours or better still immediately. The speed of providing information on the Web  conditions people to expect quick answers to questions about their needs.

Drive traffic to your site. In order to create a steady stream of traffic to your website, give your visitors a reason to visit and continue to visit in the future. You must provide your visitors with fresh content on a continual basis. Content comes in various forms, such as news, articles, tips, horoscopes, weather, etc. and is freely available on the Internet. Your content should blend in well with the focus of your website and be updated on a regular basis. The following websites provide free articles for publication: web-source, marketing-seek, idea marketers, infobot

For new design ideas and to keep abreast of Internet web site content and news, subscribe to Yahoo! Internet Life and Web Guide.magazines. Yahoo! Internet Life combines print and online content to give users easy, direct access to the best sites on World Wide Web. Every issue has hundreds of Web site reviews, category rankings, pointers, tips, and timesaving hints for exploring the Internet. Web Guide is a leading information source for easy access to a wide variety of high-quality Internet sites.

Include interactive features if possible, such as live news feeds. Check out moreover.com for tons of news feed topics you can paste into your site for free. Use chat rooms, discussion boards, etc. You want to create a sense of community where people will want to return.

Website consultation is a good and final way to make sure that a website is ready to be released to the public.  Make sure that you choose a top quality service to maximize your website's potential for success.A consultant should be able to perform: meta tag diagnosis; website load time; ease of navigation; content value; browser compatibility; spelling and grammar; and continuity of theme. NOTE: For a few of these categories, you can use a free service to evaluate your site, like the one at NetMechanic

Beyond aesthetic and navigation considerations for your site, there are design elements critical for best search engine placement. For example, search engines do not register "frame" pages. If you use "frames", you will need to create gateway pages and submit them to the search engines. Basic items to consider when designing your website for best search engine placement are: the proper use of meta tags, keyword density, repetition of keywords in the body text, etc. for best search engine placement.

You need to edit the page's "header" information to better determine the page's description at the search engine. The description depends on two of three things:
(A) Your title tag e.g. <title>site title here</title>
(B) Your description tag <meta name=description value="description here like this">
(C) The first 250 words of visible text on your site
(A) is what the engine links to your page.  (B) or (C) are used as descriptive text for your link.

Page content will effect "placement" of your web page by search engines. Each search engine uses different criterion (and this criterion changes for the same search engine quite frequently) when determining how to index your site. So your placement of the same page will vary dramatically from engine to engine. To keep current with search engine indexing criterion and to keep your pages optimized for best "placement", necessitates the use of a product like Web position.

Invaluable tool to build traffic to your web site - FREE download!

1. Your home page (index.htm)  should have a descriptive title of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the", "and", etc. This page title appears on the Web search engines when your page is found.   Entice surfers to click on the title by making it  provocative. Use descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. The more people see from the "title" that interests them,  the more likely they are to click on the link.

2. Make a list of keywords. Brainstorm a list of 50 to 100 keywords or key phrases - the kind of words or phrases someone might search on to find a business or site like yours. Then refine the list to the most important 20 or so. Note, however, that some research on search engine algorithms indicates that a fewer number of keywords may help you better target the most important search if you're working to increase your page's ranking on the search engines. Consider using both lowercase and capitalized forms of your very most important words, since some search engines are capitalization-specific.   Make sure that you don't repeat any word more than three times so you're not penalized for "keyword "spamming.

3. Write a Page Description. Select the most important keywords, and write a careful 200 to 250 characters (including spaces) sentence or two. You don't need to repeat any words used in the page title. Keep this readable but tight. Eliminate as many "filler" or "throwaway" words as you can (such as: and, the, a, an, company, etc.) to make room for the important words, the keywords that do the actual work for you. Give this to your developer for placement in your site.

At search capabilities to your site with Atomz, Freefind, Fusionbot, or Siteminer and geographical maps from Mapblast and Mapquest.

Java resources

Web by Design addresses all the critical design and technology challenges that Web designers face today with practical design concepts and techniques that apply to all major Web design tools.

Html Goodies explains the basics as well as advanced HTML, such as password protection,  counters, guest books, scrolling marquees, sound, and databases, with examples at author's website.

JavaScript Goodies is a  combination of tutorials and examples to make the most of JavaScript in your Web pages.

Font resources

Perhaps the most powerful of all applications on the Internet is the CGI script. CGI stands for the "Common Gateway Interface". It is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers.

Automark is a cgi script that will automatically pop up a "bookmark" suggestion box for first-time visitors to your website. While this can be accomplished using straight javacode, this script will not annoy regular visitors by popping up the window every time they return. The first time a new visitor hits your "target page" the bookmark window pops up.

MailNow  allows you to provide web-based email to your users. Its web-based email product provides unlimited addresses for multiple domains. A free email account is a great giveaway that ensures constant repeat visitors to your site.

Master Subscriber Pro automates joint ventures with other ezine publishers. Using this script your visitors can subscribe to an unlimited number of ezines without leaving your website to do so. Locate a few ezine publishers with traffic comparable to yours and you'll all increase your new subscriber signups!

Protect It offers a simple way to setup .htaccess or nsconfig type user authentication to your web directories using username / password. It is a solid solution for managing private site signups. This script features auto- creation and expiration of accounts, account edit features, a customizable email template, and many other configurable settings.

Your Own Associate Program - Leverage the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of other webmasters by opening up an affiliate program at your site. This script by Paul Galloway runs my program automatically and is used by many high-profile marketers.

Ecommerce

From beginners, to experienced programmers, goEmerchant.com has the products that can help any business start processing transactions today. Starting with the Internet Store (If you can type you can set it up), to the Buy Me Button (Cut and paste into existing Web Sites), to the EZ Payment Gateway (for merchants who know programming). All products include the Cyber Circular, the brand new product that allows your e-mails to sell your product or service. For merchants just starting out, the Internet store makes it easy for you to build your web site online. You don't need to know how to do any programming. It includes all of the following:

1. Customizable Home Page (Image uploads, backgrounds, themes, color choices)
2. Unlimited products and database upload capability, discount certificates customizable pull down menus and pre-integrated shipping tables (USPS, UPS, etc.).
3. Complete transaction reporting including visitor tracking and transaction history.
4. Recurring billing and full catalog product search engine shopping cart.
5. Payment gateway and a virtual terminal to process offline orders.
6. Merchant account and free web hosting of an existing web site.
Learn more at: goEmerchant.com

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