Website Advertising
Internet Advertising
Beginners Guide to Designing, Building and Marketing an Effective WebsiteA website is your face to the world. It shows who you are and what you have to offer. There are some ground rules you should follow and you can be creative too. Your website may be a glorified Yellow Pages add or a complex multilayered entity from which your company derives all its revenue. It may be a gallery showing your portfolio of creative work. Its function is to tell the world that you exist and to entice consumers or users to engage with you, purchase your products, promote your philosophy or simply share your interest. If you are building your site from scratch, you will need to learn a basic program such as Netscape Composer or Adobe Dream weaver. It can take a bit of time to learn a program, but it can be an exciting learning experience if you have the time and patience. There are many instant web design services online that enable small businesses to design web pages quickly and easily using templates. First you will need to gather information and keep it on file, such as your business logo or name, copy about your products and/or services, bi-lines, subheadings, photographs and product information. It's a good idea to build a pool of reference material before you take your webpage to a designer or developer. Web developers may have excellent technical skills but very little design sense. Often a business will commission a Graphic Designer to create the look and feel of a webpage, which will then be built by a web developer. A graphic Designer can either design your whole website or just the home page. A Graphic Designer needs to have as much information as possible before they can start to design your home page such as links, titles, sub-headings and as much of the copy as possible. The page will be designed using a Graphics package such as Illustrator or Photoshop and the developer will cut and paste the elements and convert them into the functional webpage. It's a good idea to put your developer and your designer in touch with each other so they can talk about technical aspects such as software compatibility and file format needs. Web designers and web developers often work together and there are designers who can build web pages for you, but essentially they are two separate areas of creating a web page. A Web designer is interested in the flat and graphic layout and design of each page. A designer will put together a few ideas and show you a few different layouts. They will discuss color, space and form with you and perhaps have some marketing ideas too. They may suggest a certain theme or help you 'brand' your online business. Web designers will also be familiar with the multi layering of web pages but usually they will not actually be involved in building your website or making it work if it's a complicated site. Their specialty is what it looks like. A Web developer will actually build your site and make it work. They will build what is called the 'back-end' of the site, the functionality of how each page links to other pages, how sales information is processed, how credit cards are billed, how the site flows. They may build a simple site with a few different layers and links or a more complex site that allows for changes and upgrades to the site. If you are selling a product, or showcasing your creative work, you will want to be able to add or remove products and images, articles, to upgrade prices and terms. You will not need to know programming language to do this, as they will build these pages in a user friendly way so you can interact with your site quite easily. If you are building a business site through which your company will take online sales, you will have a web developer build the site for you, but you might consult first with a designer. Many web designers will be familiar with marketing strategies, but many wont, so you have to know some marketing basics. The first mistake small businesses make when designing a website is to make it too busy, to use too many colors and to include too much information. Daniel Kohn, Marketing Manager of Advertising Web Service advisers "Keep it simple. People think they have to have a big flashy web site, the truth is that you have to have a very firm call to action. If you can't get across to your customers what you want them to do within 10 seconds of hitting your website, you've lost them. The call to action needs to be very simple, at the top of the page, and very clear. " Have a look at a few marketing books or tips by Dan Kennedy and other marketing 'gurus' (1) If your site is a gallery space your viewers may not be interested in long superfluous introductions, smooth and slick as they may be. They may want to access your product range immediately. Many elaborate sites have a caption reading 'skip intro' for this reason. Copy or text is important. If your home page is also your landing page (meaning the page customers land on after searching for you) it needs to be well written with a clear marketing 'call to action'. There are important aspects that need to be built into your site such as SEO and links. Your Web developer needs to use the best possible terminology to describe your site in heading, titles and descriptions so that you will come up under relevant listings and searches. You can also advertise using 'keywords' so that your business is listed when users search for you. If you have a business that makes surfboards, your listing needs to include every possible 'keyword' that relates to surfing, surfboards and the industry and that sport in general. The content of your pages need to use words that are relevant to the industry and repeat these words throughout your copy. You need to show the search engine that you are a legitimate site, promoting a legitimate product and make many references to your product. This is what SEO is all about. It's the process of Optimizing the search.(2) Look up Google 'Adwords' to get an understanding of how sponsored links work and how search engines match clients to services. Another essential way to market your site is to fill it with relevant links. This way your site becomes multidimensional and important. An important site is automatically pushed up in search engine ranking and the more relevant links you have to other important sites, the better. You also need to create links within your site and the way to do this is to create a dynamic and interesting site, full of useful and relevant information. You need to think laterally on this one. Links in your own website may include information pages, community pages, talk back columns or blogs, ideas from related industries, useful information, stories, creative pages, advice. The idea is to create a page others would like to link to as well. There are some excellent articles on links that you can look up online like Brandon Cornetts "10 Commandments of Link Building" (3). Once you've created a dynamic site you might start to think about external links. Google have launched a free webpage creator named Google Pages. Google Pages allows users to create web pages using a simple graphic interface that makes easy creating pages ready for the web. If you are new to the technical side of the internet you might try this option. Go to http://pages.google.com to sign up. If you have an existing Google account then getting on Google pages is very simple. After logging on you are presented with many simple templates to choose from and an interface displaying your page and some simple editing controls and tools. Google Pages allows you to upload files, create many pages so in other words you can place an index of links to connect all of your pages, creating a decent site size. Google Pages create your own web pages, quickly and easily. Google Page Creator is a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes. You can link your business site to your Google pages and to other external relevant industry pages. Use your industry resources to network and cross link. The most important thing is to do lots of research and try to understand the way the whole thing works - it really is a web, a multi-dimensional web. You have to think a bit like a cyber-spider and realize that search engines move up and down and in and out at the same time. They check pages for content, relevance heading, depth and links both within and without, and a good, complex multi dimensional, relevant and important page will be shifted higher up the ranking platform. Remember also to have fun and to stick with it, persevere and build slowly, and in no time you will be too busy taking orders to even think about how you got there!
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