The problem for most small and medium businesses is that they are too busy doing what they are good at to have time to become experts on the internet.
This leaves them vulnerable to being sucked in to commissioning expensive but potentially useless or annoying websites featuring flash animation, graphics and little information that is useful to a visitor other than brochure copy.
Here are some tips on where to start:
1. Content Management System (CMS). You need one and learning how to use it is an essentially as knowing your way around Microsoft Word or Excel. A CMS publishes to the web without needing to know any html whatsoever.
2. Which CMS? The Obama administration symbolically just moved from the specially designed CMS used by the Bush babies to the open source Drupal. If open source is good enough for the White House it is good enough for you. The three key ones to consider are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress (which is my choice and is so much more than just a blog platform). These don’t cost money to use.
3. Design. The design is a skin that fits over the structure of the website. These CMSs are very easy to set up but more difficult to design. However, you can download predesigned templates and pay a developer from a few hundred to perhaps a thousand dollars to tailor the design. The key is to keep it simple and content focused.
A simple site for a small business using these platforms can cost from under $1,000 up to $10,000. It all depends on how much graphic design work your require.
But this isn’t the end of it because you want people to visit your site which means being found by Google and other search engines. Initially, Google will drive most traffic to you. But if you work out a plan to have other quality sites and blogs to link to you (and its rude to ask for links and frowned upon by Google to pay for links), they will bring visitors that will stay longer on your site and look at more pages.
These visitors may even want to engage in an online conversation with you.
Really good useful content also helps draw visitors, and this is the realm of a blog. Each time a blog – or call it newsletter – is updated Google will recognise it and visitors will come.
Simple isn’t it? Or is it?