Beginners: Preparing your website
If you contract a web design firm to create your website, you can save costs by doing some key planning and preparation of your own. This page aims to help you work through these useful activities. The ideas generally apply to any website creation project. For more help, try our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
Website content
A vital part of making a business website is choosing the text, photos and graphics. This material - the site content - needs to be succinct, informative, and well presented; otherwise you risk being seen as an amateurish business.
- Gather all the printed marketing material you currently use, such as advertising fliers and brochures - stuff you normally dish out to prospective customers. Prepare some concise sentences on the key products and services and why people would want to buy them.
- In particular, write one key sentence of no more than 30 words describing the essence of your website or business aim. This could be used to describe what you offer when your site is listed in a directory. Then write down 10 - 20 single keywords or key phrases (up to 3 or 4 words) that could be used to reference the site and attract people entering those keywords into a search engine.
- If you have a special logo, find the cleanest and largest possible version of it for scanning. You may be able to get a paper or CD copy of it (or an emailable file) from the firm that made/printed it for you. If electronic, it needs to in GIF, JPG, PNG or TIFF format.
- Select photos that are clear and well lit. The web designer can crop these, but it's hard to improve focus, definition or colour from poor prints or shots. Normal print photo sizes are fine. Note that matt-finished print photos do not reproduce well when digitally scanned - they tend to go all grainy as the beam bounces off the irregular surface.
Photos taken by a digital camera should be provided in the JPEG (or JPG) format, and be at least 500 pixels wide and/or high.
- If you have any instruction sheets such as "how to assemble our product" or "how to find our motel" that you normally give to customers, these may be good to include in a multi-page website.
Look at websites run by your competitors. Go to Google and enter into the search field the words you would expect someone to use if they were trying to find products and services like those you offer. Look at some of the sites that this search produces, and see how they are designed and the words they use. Some will be great, some awful -- examine the good ones for ideas.
Note those which you like and tell your web designer. Look also at other favourite websites that you like the look of, regardless of their topic. Knowing what you like appearance-wise will help the designer narrow down design ideas.
You should not be expected to supply the material written in perfect English and grammar - a good web firm will edit and refine it to a professional level. But creating fluent site text from just a few keywords or phrases is a time-consuming and difficult task for any journalist, so try to gather a good amount of workable material to provide a good starting platform. If you can provide material in electronic form (on CD, flash memory or emailed), that always helps greatly.
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How many Web pages do you need?
Factors affecting this decision include:
- How many distinct types of products or services you are promoting?
- How much detail you want/need to present about each? Or do you just want people to be aware of you and then make contact for more details?
- How many extra services and features you want to include in the site, such as a newsletter or a 'tips and tricks' or backgrounder/FAQ page?
- How much money and effort you are prepared to invest into the venture.
If you want merely to announce your existence and give basic contact details, one page will do. However, such sites are rare, and visitors today expect to find more detail than this.
If you want to add further details about the overall service, or to give details of one particular product, then a two-page site should suffice - one intro (the home page) and one with details.
Most websites now include, as well as the home page, at least an 'About us' and a 'Contact us' page (maybe the same page). Both may be quite brief but they provide vital communication functions. Often the 'Contact us' page also includes a fill-in form that can be automatically emailed back to you.
If you have several products or services you wish to detail, then you will probably need to have a separate page about each (or group related ones together on a smaller number of pages). Then an important part of the site design becomes how to make it easy for visitors to find the information and how to arrange navigation buttons on the page. (That's your designer's job.)
Most websites we've built are of this type (5 pages or more), and many are still growing. Check them out on our Portfolio pages - this may give you further ideas of what is possible for your budget.
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Your website strategy
Every serious website owner needs to think through and decide on a strategy for the site - specifically, what is it that I hope the site will achieve for me or my business. This is crucial because you can spend unnecessary dollars building in features that will not serve the strategy, or scrimp on dollars by omitting features that are required for the strategy to work.
Here are some of the commonest strategies in today's web world:
- Tell the world who we are. Commonly called a 'brochure' site, the simplest sort of website usually has about 5 pages providing information about the business (or organisation) and its products and services, and allows the visitor to make contact by email (as well as conventional methods). This type of site often goes with advertising or verbal communication that tells customers to 'visit our website for more information or details'. This also saves on phone answering, if this is a problem for you.
- Save on stationery/postage. Even if nothing is sold on a website, and no new customers are sought, it can be a repository for downloadable documents such as product installation sheets, newsletters, booking forms and other material that otherwise would need to be printed and posted.
- Find new customers. Extend your reach (even beyond your geographic market limits) to gain new customers you could not otherwise reach. For this you need desirable products/services, good presentation, and website preparation and editing so that search engines like the site and rank it well. Even if you don't sell to these people first up, you may be able to grow your list of prospects (see next item).
- Offer value-added services to potential or existing customers. Your site could provide extra services to a customer/prospect base, which makes them want to buy more or even just feel better about your products. These services could include a monthly newsletter email-out, sample recipes for food products bought in shops, discounted prices, or articles of interest. (We like to think that the page you are reading is a value-added service provided by TechWriter to potential site owners or in fact to any visitors.)
- Sell products or services. The strategies of most larger websites centre on allowing visitors to buy products in a 'shopping cart' and pay for them by credit card or other on-line mechanism. This is one of the toughest but most rewarding website strategies, and it does involve a greater investment than the other strategies mentioned above.
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Preparing the site for search engine exposure
For many websites, it is very important that you get the best possible exposure to the most popular search engines, so that you will appear higher on their results when searchers are looking for sites like yours. Although website developers (and owners) don't have much influence over what search engines do with our sites, we can at least make some basic efforts to improve our chances.
A standard part of most professional website designers' work is to plan and incorporate the most important elements of what is termed 'search engine optimisation', and you can help enormously here.
The most important thing you can do is requested in item 2 of the section higher on this page (Preparing website content), where you are asked to (a) write one key sentence of no more than 30 words describing the essence of your website or business aim; and (b) provide 10 - 20 single keywords that could be used to reference the site and attract people entering those keywords into a search engine. You are the person best placed to decide the most important keywords for your business.
The other activity a good designer will work with you on is to include as many of your main keywords in the site text (particularly the home page text) as can be achieved, while still keeping the writing easy to read and grammatically professional.
Note that the biggest search engines (including Google) penalise sites that (a) overdo keyword saturation to the point where it is obviously spamming, (b) try tricks like making invisible text. They also don't like to investigate sites that use 'frames' constructions, use mainly (or all) graphics on the home page (including Flash animation-driven navigation), or have no text-based links on the home page.
