Here are my 5 Rules for Small Business Websites.
Rule # 1, Use a content management system for your website, this means your web designer is focusing on the content and not infrastructure to make it all work. The thinking behind doing it this way is that you can log in to the site and make changes yourself without having to pay lots to your website designer to make small tweaks to the wording on your website. Plus you get the benefit of thousands of development hours that have gone into building the content management system, meaning cool features that if built from scratch would cost the earth. Remember, the main things you’ll want to change is the text content of your site, and who knows this stuff best, yes you, so save a bundle doing this yourself, it only takes a few minutes anyway..
Rule # 2, Don’t bother with flashy graphics. This could affect you later on because if your site is graphics intensive, it may be much more difficult to make changes. Make sure and don’t forget that as the number of images increase then as a general rule the time your site takes to load decreases and Google frowns upon slow loading site (meaning it makes it harder to get a great ranking in Google).
Rule # 3, All wording on your site should be text and not some image containing the text. There’s good reasons you will need to do that. Among them are that Google can’t read text that is contained in an image. And if it cannot read this text then it can’t help you get found in Google for that text.
Rule # 4, Ask for a walk through or hands on demonstration of the content management system to make sure you’ll be able to use it and it fits with what you want to be able to do with your website. To do this you may need to push for your website designer to give you actual hands on use, but it will be worth it because you’ll see how easy or not it really is for you.
Rule # 5, Dominating Google search results is about having multiple websites. What we mean is you have your primary website plus several secondary supporting sites so that these too can also show on page 1 of the Google search results. This may include having several 1 page sites, blogs, or other sites that point to your primary website for full information about your business. It is important because each time you take up one of the 10 search results, that’s one less of your competitors showing up and one less opportunity for your competitor to get a click from a prospective purchaser.
These are my 5 rules when it comes to small business websites, they have been time-tested and proved to work for ourselves and our customers.
