All businesses today need a website, whether you want to gain more customers via search engines and advertising like AdWords or you just want to add substance to your business for your existing clients, websites are a very important element in your business’ success.

However many small businesses never seem to allow budget or enough budget to build their websites, often deciding to build it themselves, to get someone in the office to build it or to get a friend who’s ‘good with computers’ to build one for them. – This is generally false economy and can often do more harm than good.

Professionally built websites can now be bought for as little as a couple of hundred pounds and involve a lot of additional ‘behind the scenes’ work done by the web designer, however, if you do decide to follow the DIY route, here are 5 things that can help you to gain success:

1. Make it look right – Many people think that design is just a case of choosing some nice colours and adding loads of different typestyles. In fact, they couldn’t be further from the truth – professional design and web design in particular is a very in-depth subject – from colour palettes through to usability, companies spend millions of pounds every year on web design and corporate identity – Learn from the big boys, take a look at the leaders in your field, what are they doing?

Don’t copy their sites, but just take a look and see what is commonly done – a lot can be learnt from studying your opposition – and always remember, when it comes to design – KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!!) – Less really is more, don’t go building your site with 20 different typestyles – stick to one or two, it really will look better and plain fonts such as Arial look more modern than fonts with serifs such as Times – Take a look at Apple’s website, it really couldn’t be any simpler in design – but it looks and works great.

2. Let Google read your text – Whether your building your site with a program such as FrontPage, Mr Site, Dreamweaver or having a go at programming raw HTML with a text editor, don’t be tempted to take the easy route, especially when it comes to putting your text in – years ago it was quite common for sites (even professionally built ones) to be completely built in programs such as Flash or to be built using pages of graphics, sliced up and positioned on screen in tables.

The reason people did this? – One reason was for ease, design the pages in a graphics program such as Photoshop then just cut and paste the images into a webpage. Another reason was for consistency – put your text content in your webpage as graphics and hey presto, everyone will see the same layout, same font style etc..

Why should you not do this? – Well for a start, slower loading pages (because of all the graphics) but more importantly, Search Engines such as Google need text on web pages to index from – put it all in as graphics and your site is pretty much invisible to Google.

3. Content is King – Google, Google, Google – I hear it all day long, but people are right, Google can make or break businesses – Get a site working well with Google and this time next year you could be a Millionaire…

Joking aside, Google is very important, getting your pages nearer the top for prime searches can make a difference of hundreds of website hits per month (or even in a day!!), but a great looking site doesn’t mean a great ranking site – The saying “Content is King” is smack on, Google loves content – a good trick for building a site on a real budget, that can be ranked well is to just set up a free blog on a system such as Blogger, buy a cheap domain name, point it to your blog home page, then fill your blog with relevant content.

4. Test and Measure – Several years ago I worked with a business consultant who analysed everything and I mean everything within businesses and then he helped to make improvements – all he ever said was “Test and Measure, Test and Measure” – “how can you improve something if you don’t know how it performs already?”.

I have a lot of people who come to me and want to improve hits and traffic on their website, when I ask them how many hits do you currently receive a month?, I generally just get blank looks back, then most of them reply – “we don’t know”.

From day one of your site going live, add an analytics system to your website – some hosting companies will include this in their hosting package – to use these systems just log into your hosting control panel and look for analytics or statistics, if you do not have this you can use a system such as Google Analytics (Which I personally prefer) – just type Google Analytics into Google, click the link and follow the instructions – once signed up you will need to paste a bit of HTML code into all of the web pages you want to track, you can do this by opening the pages in a text editor such as Notepad.

Once installed you will be able to view a multitude of data – such as how many people are visiting your site every day, where they are coming from, what pages they are looking at etc, etc…

This is one of the most important elements of a website – if something you are doing on a certain page is attracting more attention, then do more of it, if something on a page seems to be turning your customers away, then change it and quick.

5. Website Hosting and Free Hosting - Another website element is hosting, web hosting is the location your website sits on the internet – like a hard drive that everybody can see. This is an annual charge and although generally it isn’t that expensive, it is still another cost when setting up on a budget.

Now I would always recommend purchasing a proper hosting package from a reputable company, but if you’re on a real budget many companies offer free hosting – The downside of this is they generally want you to add their advertisements to your site, but if you’re starting out, it is a great way to get going – just type ‘free web hosting’ into Google and take your pick, however, as soon as your budget allows I would recommend switching to your own purchased package.

The downsides of free hosting are that they generally are not as reliable as purchased packages and the added advertisements will cheapen the look of your site and branding.

As I suggested at the start of this article, Doing It Yourself can often do more harm than good – Many people can be reluctant to contact a web design company in fear of huge prices and constant pestering once the initial contact is made – However professional web design packages can start from as little as two hundred pounds, and many web design companies such as Pinkmango are happy to provide free estimates and advice with no pestering or hassle.

Simon O’Carroll has over 10 years experience in web design and 20 years experience in marketing and branding for many blue chip clients such as BMW, Land Rover and Jaguar. He owns Pinkmango a Web Design Agency based in Poole, Dorset and Redditch, Birmingham offering Web Design Services to businesses from Start-Ups to Blue Chip. If you require web design in Poole, Dorset, web design in Redditch Birmingham or UK then visit Pinkmango online at http://www.pinkmango.co.uk.

Author: Simon O’Carroll
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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