Building a website for a small and medium enterprise can be a stress free
experience If handled efficiently. Follow these 10 basic web site design tips
and they will make your task much easier.
1. Own Your Project: It’s your site, your investment on the line. Be
prepared to lead and keep the momentum heading towards a realistic
launch date. Be patient but firm and keep directing the flow towards your
end goal. If you don’t have the time to manage the construction of the
site, hire someone who does.
2. Choose Your Color Scheme and Layout: Search the web and
choose a few sites featuring the colors and layouts you like and a
few sites with colors and layouts you don’t like. Otherwise, you might
be presented with a design or color scheme that is not what you had in
mind and that will be force a major delay in your site launch date while
you start from scratch again.
3. Decide on Theme and Images: Choose your images with a common
theme in mind and make sure your concept is easy to understand.
Run it by your friends and family, if they don’t get the idea immediately,
you need to go back to the drawing board. There are lots of great images
you can purchase on the web, however, make sure that the theme and
the backgrounds of the images are consistent. Merging light and dark
backgrounds can make the best images look out of place. You can find
a great variety of royalty free images on Fotosearch.com.
4. Plan Your Site Structure: Write your site structure down on paper
or use an excel spreadsheet; otherwise, it might get out of control. Keep
it simple but scalable so you can continue to add pages as the need or
demand arises.
5. Hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Firm: Your developer
should have SEO experience or be working with an SEO firm. You
want your links and content developed around keywords and phrases
that customers are actually using to search for your products not industry
insider terms that your customers are not familiar with. An SEO firm
will guide you through the process. You can find top SEO firms advertising
on Searchenginewatch.com or go to Google and type in
search engine optimization and visit some SEO sites.
6. Meet Suggested Deadlines: A good web design firm will give you
target dates for images, content, keyword development and site structure.
Be prepared to meet the proposed deadlines at the agreed time or you will
be put on the sidelines while the developer works with a client that has their
act together.
You know what you want; you have assembled a team of experts and
You understand the perils of keeping your teammates waiting……
You are good to go!
7. Begin With Keyword Research: Participate in the keyword research
but trust your SEO partner. Start with Google Suggest, a free keyword
tool. Start typing your keyword phrase. Google Suggest will show you a
drop down list with numerous alternative keyword phrases that might be
valuable to your business. Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool provides free
results as well
Once you have exhausted these tools, Wordtracker.com is a terrific paid
subscription software that can lead you into profitable directions you
may never have imagined.
8. Start Writing Your Content Now! Did I say now, I meant right now!
Now that you have your keyword phrase list, you will soon discover what
an onerous task it can be to write the content for an entire site. A better
idea might be to outsource the content to a good writer. You can edit their
work before you site goes live and your SEO firm should have a hand in the final product. You can find a list of award winning content writers at TopSEOS .com.
should you decide to outsource your content development.
9. Don’t Assume Anything: Just because you have given instructions to
one of your teammates don’t assume that they are being executed. Keep
a list of items that you have delegated and check to see if they have been
completed.
10. Edit The Site Yourself: Once the site is complete, review every page
for spelling mistakes, graphic mishaps, incorrect internal linking and
unnecessary links to the SEO or developer sites. Review your site in Internet
Explorer and Firefox to make sure it is consistent both web browsers.
Anticipate delays in your project but keep the pedal to the metal until the site
is operational. Don’t compromise on your vision of the site but be flexible
enough not causing major delays in the construction. Finally, track
everything. Your new site will be drawing web traffic to your business; you need
to know where your visitors are coming from.
