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Authors: Inc The Staff of Entrepreneur Media

Start Your Own Business (72 page)

BOOK: Start Your Own Business
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A website is typically a collection of individual web pages that are connected with hyperlinks. What makes a good website? Before getting enmeshed in design details, get the big picture by writing a site outline. In addition to basic text, your website can incorporate photos, illustrations, animation, videos, audio clips, music, and a plethora of other multimedia elements or content that will convey your information to your target audience in an easy-to-understand, visually appealing and appropriate manner. The content you develop and publish should directly relate to and help you achieve the goals and objectives you’ve set for your website.
A well-thought-out site outline includes:
•
Content.
The key to a successful site is content. Give site visitors lots of interesting information, incentives to visit and buy, and ways to contact you. Once your site is up and running, continually update and add fresh content to keep people coming back.
•
Structure.
Decide how many pages to have and how they’ll be linked to each other. Choose graphics and icons that enhance the content.
•
Design.
With the content and structure in place, site design comes next. Whether you’re using an outside designer or doing it yourself, concentrate on simplicity, readability and consistency. Remember to focus on what you want to accomplish.
•
Navigation.
Make it easy and enjoyable for visitors to browse the site. For example, use no more than two or three links to major areas and never leave visitors at a dead end.
•
Credibility.
This is an issue that shouldn’t be lost in the bells and whistles of establishing a website. Your site should reach out to every visitor, telling that person why he/she should buy your product or your service. It should look very professional, and give potential customers the same feeling of confidence they would get with a phone call or face-to-face visit with you. Remind visitors that you don’t exist only in cyberspace. Your company’s full contact information—company name, complete address, telephone, fax, and e-mail—should appear on all or most of your individual web pages and be displayed prominently on your site’s home page.
An outline helps you get the most out of your website design/ e-commerce budget. It will also help you determine whether you, or someone in your company, can design portions of the website, or if you need to solicit outside help. That way, when you hire someone, it will be for only the parts of the job that you’ll need to have outsourced.
At this point, you have two options: You can bring your detailed outline to a prospective web designer, or you could go the do-it-yourself route. Once a designer has your outline, the process will be more efficient, but creating a website from scratch can still be costly and time-consuming. Consider researching one of the many website or e-commerce turnkey solution services, which allow you to design, publish and manage a website or e-commerce site by customizing website templates using online design and management tools. These services are inexpensive, powerful, and allow you to create highly professional websites with no programming skills.
There are only a few possible reasons why you’d want to hire a website designer and/or programmer to have your site created from scratch vs. using a turnkey solution. One reason would be if you absolutely require specialized functionality (either on the front or back end of the site) that isn’t offered by the turnkey solutions. Many startups initially spend too much on a custom-designed site that wasn’t really required, and, ultimately, regret the decision since their financial resources could have been put to better use elsewhere. Instead, it’s best to rely on an inexpensive turnkey solution for creating, publishing and managing your website. As your company grows and becomes successful, it’s then possible to transition to a custom-designed site, if the need arises.
“A dream is just a
dream. A goal is a
dream with a plan and
a deadline.”
—HARVEY MACKAY,
FOUNDER OF
MACKAY ENVELOPE CO.
 
 
Once you know what tools and resources you’ll use to create and manage the site, the next step is to organize your site’s potential content into a script. Your script is the numbered pages that outline the site’s content and how web pages will flow from one to the next. Page one is your home page, the very first page that site visitors see when they type in your URL. Arrange all the icons depicting major content areas in the order you want them. Pages two through whatever correspond to each icon on your home page.
Writing a script also ensures your website is chock-full of appropriate content that’s well-organized. Offer your visitors content that’s valuable, informative and engaging—make it worth their while to spend time on your site. Provide regular opportunities for visitors to get more content. Whether you offer a blog, free electronic newsletter, a calendar of events, columns from experts, or book reviews, your content and the site’s structure become the backbone of your website.
RESEARCH MADE PERFECT
 
R
esearch is what makes an effective website. Some good resources are:
•
Entrepreneur.com
’s Online Business How-To Guides
(entrepreneur .com/ebusiness/howtoguides/index.html). This series of articles offers everything you need to know about starting, running and growing your online business.
•
E-Commerce Guide’s Starting an Online Store: The Essential Checklist
(
ecommerce-guide.com
). These articles list everything you’ll need to get your online store off the ground.
 
As part of your website design, use graphics, colors and fonts that make sense (not just to you but to your target audience as well). Subtle visual cues make all the difference in how visitors respond to your website. Surf the net to research what combinations of fonts, colors and graphics appeal to your audience, and incorporate pleasant and effective design elements into your site.
If your target audience is comprised of tween or teenage girls, using a color combination of pinks, reds and other feminine or pastel colors, along with more decorative (yet easy-to-read font) makes sense. However, if you’re targeting middle-age businessmen, a more masculine color scheme, combined with traditional fonts, should be used.
 
TIP
 
When creating and designing your web content, you won’t go wrong if you follow three basic design rules:
1. Put the most important pages near the top.
2. Eliminate extraneous words and visual clutter from the content.
3. Use headlines, icons, bullets, boldface words and color only to draw attention to important content, not to distract or confuse the web surfer.
To create a successful website, all the elements must work seamlessly. Sure, having top-notch content is essential, but it must be displayed in a manner that’s easy to understand, visually appealing, simple to navigate, and of interest to your target audi ence. How you present your information is important. It’s not just about what you have to say, but it’s also the manner in which you present that content that will either attract or repel your audience.
Handy Tools
 
Your website is your online presence and your connection to the world, so give it your very best shot, making sure it conveys the image and message you want and need your customers to see. Fortunately, there are loads of tools to help you improve your website’s appearance.
For those of you who love the feel of a book, two good ones about building websites are
The Unofficial Guide to Starting a Business Online
(Wiley) by Jason R. Rich and
Entrepreneur
magazine’s startup guide No. 1819,
Online Business,
by Robert McGarvey and Melissa Campanelli (available at
smallbizbooks.com
). They both give detailed, hands-on advice about website design, as well as plenty of helpful dos and don’ts.
SUCCESS BY DESIGN
 
F
or a successful website, follow these general dos and don’ts of site design.
Do:
• Make your site easy to navigate.
• Use a consistent look, layout, design and feel throughout your site.
• Make sure your website works with all the popular web browsers (Explorer, Safari, Foxfire, Chrome, etc.).
Don’t:
• Use text and color combinations that are too busy or distracting. Anything that makes your site confusing or hard to read should be eliminated immediately.
• Allow the content or links on your website to become outdated; update, fine-tune and proofread regularly.
 
Finding the Host with the Most
 
Now that you have your site’s design and content creation well underway, the next step is publishing your site on the net. For this, you have three basic options. The first is to host it yourself on a computer that can be dedicated as a web server (or a computer that’s permanently connected to the internet) and has a broadband internet connection. This will prove costly to set up and maintain. For most online businesses, this isn’t the best option, at least in the beginning.
The second option is to use an established and reputable web hosting company, which stores and manages websites for businesses, among other services. There are several large and well-established web hosting companies that cater to a worldwide audience, including Yahoo!, Google and
GoDaddy.com
.
 
AHA!
 
If you know what you want to say but are not sure how to best say it, one option is to hire a copywriter to transform your idea into compelling text. If, however, you opt to do the writing yourself, the book
Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works
(Morgan Kaufmann) by Janice Redish is an excellent resource, as is
Killer Web Content
(A&C Black) by Gerry McGovern.
Some companies, however, prefer local, small-hosting providers, since they offer a direct contact—especially important if your site goes down. Most of these companies also offer domain name services, which we mentioned above, so you can sign up when you choose your name.
A third option—and the most popular (as well as least expensive)—is to use a website turnkey solution. As we mentioned above, this is a company that provides all the site development tools and hosting services in one easy-to-use, low-cost, bundled service, which is entirely online-based. In other words, to create, publish and manage your website, you don’t need to install any specialized software, and no programming is required. Using an internet search engine, enter the phrase “website turnkey solution” or “e-commerce turnkey solution.” Also, check out what’s offered by Yahoo!, Google,
GoDaddy.com
and
eBay.com
.
BOOK: Start Your Own Business
13.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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