Because of the high visibility of your site, and the importance that first impressions make, it is important to have a site that is well-designed in terms of aesthetics as well as functionality. Online sales are a huge part of retail revenue – just last year, online retail sales reached $177 billion. And because of the level playing field online selling can give small business to compete with larger competitors, having a top notch web site for your business is a must.

While many business owners can easily design attractive and reliable web pages on their own, less tech savvy owners may want to turn to a professional web developer to help build their Internet pages. Web developers are professionals who develop software specifically for Internet applications and webpages. They can provide you with the technical expertise neccessary to take the concepts you have for your website and bring them online.

A good web developer will be able to create an attractive, functional site for your small business. He or she will be able to use the resources you make available to him to make your site perform to the limits of those resources. The web developer you want will be able to take input from you and put it into action onscreen, and will also be able to advise you about ideas you may have that are impractical or unfeasible.

A qualified web developer will need to be skilled in hand-coding HTML and should also be able to work in CSS. Your web developer should also be familiar with JavaScript, XML, CGI scripting, and should also be able to work with a variety of servers.

When advertising for a web developer, you’ll need to determine whether you’ll need a full time employee or someone who can work on a contractual or part-time basis. For many small business start-ups, all that is needed is for the web developer to do the initial work in getting the site up off the ground and instructing the owner how to do basic maintenance. However, it is recommended that you keep the web developer’s contact information handy in case technical support or advice is needed.

Web developers can be found online using Elance or Craigslist, or you may want to turn to some fellow business owners you know and trust to help you find a reliable web developer.

When hiring a web developer, you’ll want to ask specifically about their technical skills. Ask for a detailed resume, including their education and previous employers. Ask to see what web sites they’ve helped design and check the references they’ve provided to get an idea of the quality of work they’re able to produce.

When talking to potential hires, outline what you want done with your site, and ask the interviewee direct questions about how he or she would accomplish your goals. This gives you the opportunity to assess the developer’s technical skills, as well as the developer’s skills in communicating with his or her potential employer. Technical skills are important, but the ability to understand and adapt to an employer’s requests are also key skills that your web developer must have.

When hiring a web developer you’ll want an individual or team who can design the information architecture – that is, how information is organized – on your site. It’s also important to choose a developer with graphic design skills who can pick attractive graphics, colors and fonts for your site. Programming skills are, of course, a must as well and the developer or developers you hire should also have the neccessary skills to test and launch the new site.

Be upfront about the technology and resources you’re able to provide the web developer and ask about the web developer’s own equipment and resources. And before making a final agreement, be sure to outline exactly what you want from the web developer and also work with him or her to come up with a series of milestones and a completion date. The dates don’t have to be set in stone, but having regular progress markers is important to getting the job done in a timely manner.

While this seems like such a basic statement, how many times have you gone to a company’s website and couldn’t find the telephone number or address of the business without a lot of searching, and sometimes never?

Where Are You?

The point of having a small business website is to get business. Don’t make a potential client or customer search for your contact information, you phone number and email should be highly visible on every page of your website. If your small business has a store front, or any physical location where you want customers to come in, then this address should also be posted along with the phone number and email.

Put the contact information in the header, footer, and on the sidebar of each web page. There is nothing more frustrating for a potential customer than trying to figure out how to get a hold of you. Having easily available contact information also helps the customer feel as if you are a real business.

Who Are You?

Provide a little personality to your website. Pictures and videos can help you do this. If you have a store front or office, take a picture of it and clearly label it as your business. If you have employees, do a good group photo and post that too. If it is just you, you may want to consider having a professional head-shot done, and get the digital rights to the picture so you can post it on line. Make sure the pictures are clear, and are good shots. You don’t want to project a sloppy, out of focus corporate personality!

Often a short video will allow your customers or clients to meet you before they buy something or hire you to do something. For instance, if you are a handy-man, do a short video on a home maintenance topic…say changing the furnace filter…then make sure to give the phone number or email if they have any questions.

If an instructional video won’t work for your business, why not try a video showcasing a few happy customers? The inexpensive digital video cameras available today make this an inexpensive tool for highlighting your personality, and your business.

What Are You Selling?

Your home page should not be your blog. Blogs are great, but they don’t often highlight exactly what it is you are trying to sell. Your main web page should be a static page or something like the WP-Sticky plugin offered by WordPress found here.

This takes your blog users first to a static page that you can use to describe the business, and or your product or services, with, of course, your phone number, email, and possibly your address. Then they can click on your latest blog post.

As a small business owner you want your homepage to let people know who you are and what you are selling or the service you are offering.

Less is Very Often More

Unless your small business is promoting other companies or people, you will find that putting up two high quality articles or posts per month will get you more than Tweeting or blogging every day. This can be sales or service reminders, or articles written about something that relates to your business that customers might enjoy or get knowledge from.

Do you want your tax account to Tweet you a couple times a day, or would you rather he worked on your taxes and published a few hints or guides each month on how to save receipts or what items might be tax deductible.

Predictable is Better

Don’t get cute or creative with your website navigation. Make it easy on your customers and put the navigation where they expect to find it, at the top of the page or in a left sidebar. And home means Home, and Contact or Contact Us is much better than some clever tab labeled Ravyn’s Nest that no one understands meant this is where your contact information is located.

Keep it predictable so that clients won’t have to search for information and get frustrated with your creative mind.

Links Are Important

You obviously don’t want to advertise the competition, but a small business you know and use or that compliment your offerings is a great tool. Ask these businesses to share links, which means that you put a link and description on your site for their business, and they put one on their website for your business.

Ask For Business

So you’ve got all this information about your business or product on your website, now you need to ask the customer to click here for more information, click for contact information and ask them to contact you, or to click here to buy. You have to be clear in your own mind on what you want each customer to do once they visit your website, and then include several “calls to action” inviting them to do just that.

If you are selling something, sell it. Ask the customer to buy and provide the means for them to do so. If you are providing a service, tell the customer to call or email now for a free quote, or to set up an appointment. Invite them to contact you and they will be more inclined to do so.

If you don’t choose to use the web hosting company’s software, you or your web developer can upload your web design to the hosting company’s servers by following the hosting company’s guidelines, policies, and accepted software. Once the uploaded files have been submitted online to the web host, the website or webpage is available on the Internet for your customers and clients to see.

The tools provided by the web hosting company, and even web building software packages make it easy for anyone to design and build web pages and load them on the Internet. These easy to use web builders allow you to customize pre-made pages, so you don’t need to understand HTML or how to do complicated programming. You can also hire a web designer to design the artwork and technical aspects of your website, which would provide a completely individualized look for your website.

Choosing the Best Small Business Web Hosting Company for Your Needs

There are web hosting companies that will charge just a few dollars per month for your website, and some that will charge much more. Generally the cost of the hosting is dependent on a number of things. Some hosting companies charge very little, but they will add banner ads to your web site, which might be okay if you are doing a personal site, but probably not the best choice for a business. Typically these banner ads would advertise similar businesses to yours, so basically you would be providing space to the competition.

Think about your company’s goals and what you need to accomplish. Will your site have just a few pages, explaining who you are and what you do? Or will you have hundreds of pages detailing product or services and need a shopping cart and some sort of payment method? Often the web hosting pricing is dependent on how much space you will use on their server. (A server is the computer that will hold all your web pages.)

It is also important for you to realize that if you choose a hosting company for your small business and determine after a period of time that you don’t like the hosting company, you can move your domain name and your website to a new company fairly easily.

As you are looking at the different web hosts, make sure you look at comparisons sites. If you plan to build your own website, look at the reviews and see how easy it it’s to use the hosting companies website builder. Some are much easier than others. The reviewers will make statements like the best thing about X company is that it offers unlimited email accounts, if don’t plan on using the email services or only need three email accounts, than this isn’t important.

Decide if you will need 24/7 tech support. If your website is critical to your business, you may not only want tech support, but may also want server redundancy (which means there is more than one server that your website will be stored on, if one goes down, the website is still up.) and other technical and customer support options. If the website isn’t critical, than you may be able to choose a hosting company that has great stats when it comes to up time, (meaning their servers are rarely down) but that don’t provide round the clock service or redundancy.

If you need shopping cart, or a way for the customers that go to your website to buy things, make sure the hosting company allows or supports that option. This includes anything you specifically require for your website.

Summary

The best small business web hosting company is one that will meet your needs, not only for designing and implementing your website, but for making simple and complex changes, as well as for reporting and getting the website listed in search engines.

As you are choosing a web hosting company for your business, look at the types of reports the hosting company will provide. You may want to check at what point browsers are leaving the site, if some pages get more hits than others, and more. Also check what guidelines the hosting company gives you for getting your website noticed by the search engines. This is an important part of driving traffic to your small business website.

Despite the many benefits a website can offer small businesses, nearly half of them don’t have one. According to a 2010 marketing study, about 46 percent of small businesses had websites. That’s up from 33 percent two years previously, but nevertheless, the Web is still underutilized by small business.

This is unfortunate because small businesses can use their online presence to compete on a more equal footing with larger businesses. An effective small business website can actually give small businesses a competitive advantage over their larger competitors, particularly if the site’s design is more attractive and user friendly.

When building a website for your business, take in mind the following steps to create the best possible site:

1. Pick the right web address – When creating your website, you’ll need to pick a web address. Domain names are hot commodities, so you may not be able to get the domain name you want or you may have to pay a premium to get it. Picking a domain name is a lot like picking a business name, it needs to be creative, attention-getting and appropriate for your business. In fact, it’s encouraged for new business owners to pick a domain name while they’re developing the name for their business.

If you’re an established business that’s going online, you’ll need to pick a domain name that is easy to remember and fits your business. As mentioned above, you may not be able to just use the name of your business, as the domain name may already belong to someone else. When purchasing the domain name for your business, you may also want to purchase similar domain names to prevent competitors or malicious individuals from associating your business name with inappropriate content.

2. Design a professional-looking site – Consider your website as your online storefront. An unattractive, cluttered storefront will not attract customers. Your site needs an attractive, clean design that is appropriate for your business. Use videos, pictures and graphics as needed, but don’t let them overwhelm your site. Also shy away from overly plain, cookie-cutter looking sites, as it gives your business an amateur image.

3. Make sure it works. Periodically look over your site to make sure it is functioning properly and provides an easy shopping or browsing experience for your visitors. The key is simplicity. You want to ensure that visitors to your site can get to information about products and services quickly, with a minimum of clicks. It’s also important to make sure the process is intuitive, as the last thing visitors to a website want to do is spend a lot of time reading instructions about how to view or buy something.

4. Monitor your traffic. Once you launch your website, you’ll want to monitor how much traffic it gets to determine how effective it is. If your traffic is getting a lot of traffic, that means its easy for your customers to find and the design of the site is likely conducive to a good online experience. If you’re not getting a lot of traffic, you may need to think about redesigning your site or checking it to see if it has any technical problems that may be preventing it from getting the traffic it needs.

5. Hire a professional. If you can afford the services of a competent web technician, by all means hire one to help design and maintain your site. While basic web design is easy to learn, and, in time, something you can easily learn to do on your own, the launch of your business website may be something you want to entrust to an experienced web professional. There are a variety of websites where you can find good web designers who will work at competitive rates to help design a good site for your business.

6. Consider using SEO – Search Engine Optimization can help ensure that customers are directed to your site by search engines. Studies show that most people only look at the first two pages of search results when looking for something online, so getting a high rank on search engine results for specific keywords is important. There are a variety of ways you can boost your rankings, many of which, such as the strategic use of keywords throughout the copy of your site, you can do yourself. For a little extra edge, you may want to employ a search engine optimization specialist who can help you with the more technical and esoteric aspects of web design to help maximize your search engine results.

7. Online payment – Setting up an online store or a means of allowing your customers to pay their bills online can be a winner for small businesses, as it can provide them with a wider regional footprint for their goods or can allow their customers a more convenient means of paying bills. When setting up an online payment option, it is important to use a payment processor you can trust to correctly send you the appropriate funds for a transaction and protect the identity of your customers. Paypal is often regarded as the industry standard for online payment and is easy to incorporate into most small business websites.

8. Alliances – You may want to post links to other small businesses you’re friendly with to build up a mutual network of support. By referring your customers to other small businesses they may like and having them do vice versa, you help protect your small business community while gaining new potential customers.

By building a professional, well-designed website, you can take advantage of the many marketing and sales opportunities provided by the growing proliferation of the Internet in homes and offices throughout the world. The Internet has become nearly ubiquitous in American society, giving businesses with websites a clear advantage over companies that don’t have a way to reach out to their customers in their homes. Small businesses, increasingly under pressure from consolidation and globalization, cannot afford to skip these opportunities.

When hiring a web developer to create your website, you need clear unambiguous language in your employment agreement that you hold the intellectual property rights for the material on your site. Leaving the legal status of the content and design of your site is highly inadvisable, as it can result in your content being duplicated by a competitor or used unscrupulously by someone out to ruin your business.

Intellectual property laws determine the ownership of a wide variety of creative work, such as books, movies, music, logos, inventions, etc. that are protected by copyright, trademark or patent. Copyright is very important to web development work, because many of the parts of websites fall under copyright protection. When you hire a web developer to build your site, you need a solid agreement on the ownership of the content of your site and how permission is granted for others to use the content.

In general, the copyrightable material of a website include its text, photographs, graphic designs, artwork. Technology developed for your site, such as programs specific to your site and databases used by your company are also typically copyrightable material.

Databases are an important and confidential part of a company’s intellectual property, and if they’re not protected under copyright, others can take and make use of them. Also, the access of personal data by customers by outside parties may anger customers if they become aware of it. That’s just one reason why securing the intellectual property of your online presence is important.

What is a copyright?

When you own the copyright to something, it essentially means that other parties are not allowed to reproduce, modify, distribute or sell the copyrighted material without your consent. Permission to use copyrighted material is known as license. When you license content, you do not transmit ownership, you merely allow another party the legal right to use the material in narrowly defined circumstances. Buying the copyright would give a buyer full legal rights to the work.

Typically the creator of a work is considered to be its copyright holder, but when an employee creates a work for an employer, the work is likely to be considered a “work for hire,” giving the employer the rights to the material. Many businesses outsource web work to independent contractors, however. Using independent contractors is often the only option for small businesses, who may not have the resources to hire a web developer as an employee, and who may not need a full-time web developer. Having a work created by contractors may put it in a grey area with regard to copyright, making it essential that you have agreements clearly spelling out ownership of copyright.

There are some cases however, in which a creative work cannot be changed into a work for hire. In those cases it is necessary to have a written and signed copyright assignment from the creator of the work.  While some aspects of web development may automatically fall to your ownership under the law, having your contractor assign all copyright via written agreement is the easiest way to ward of potential problems later.

In short, in order for your business to obtain copyright to materials created by a web developer for your site you’ll need to either hire the developer as an employee or have him or her assign copyright to you or your business.

License agreements

Occasionally, you may work with a web developer who may not want to assign copyright ownership of certain aspects of your web site to you, as they may not want to transfer copyright of technology they’ve designed for your site such as a content management system or a search engine or shopping cart function.

In cases like these, you’ll need to obtain license from the web developer to use the copyrighted material, as without license, you could have difficulty in editing content or making changes to the technology to fit the needs of your website and business.

When making a deal for a license agreement with a developer, you’ll need to protect your company’s ability to make changes to your website in the future. Many businesses have had to start new websites from scratch after having a falling out or other parting of the ways with a web developer when they needed to make changes to the site. Your license agreement needs to give your company the ability to make changes to code that your web developer created for your business web site.

Also, your license agreement may want to restrict who the web developer can offer the technology he or she developed for your company. By keeping the technology out of the hands of your competitors, you can help maintain any competitive edge it gives your online business.

When deciding copyright and license agreements, remember that the more important the content or technology used on your site is, the more vital it is that you get ownership or have a strict license agreement regarding its use.