Build a Website – Now

Ten years ago, having a website was optional. Not anymore.

Put up at least one page with basic information about your company, such as name, products or services offered, where to buy, address, phone, fax and email information. You can find web hosting services for as little as a few dollars per month.

Because honesty and integrity are essential ingredients of business success, you want to convey that on your website without saying so directly.  Nothing appears more dishonest than a business proclaiming that it is honest.

What to do? Provide all the relevant information visitors are looking for in plain, direct ways on your website.

Show a photo of your facilities, supply a map (you can get them for free from Google Maps or other online mapping services), include your name, address, phone, fax and email information on every page, guarantee your products or services in writing, offer money back guarantees on everything you sell. These honest actions will say more about your company than flowery adjectives.

Include descriptive adjectives on your website so search engines like Google and Bing will include your company in search results for your products and services. Don’t try to trick the search engines, just be truthful, otherwise you might get blacklisted. Their software is very, very smart.

1 and 1 Internet is a very good web hosting service company. They are inexpensive (especially for Linux hosting), reliable – I haven’t had any downtime in years, and have many easy-to-use tools for first time web users. You can build a simple, good-looking web page yourself. Just look at other websites and copy the ones you like.

If you see something really cool on a website and are wondering how they did it, just click on “View Page Source” from your browser’s toolbar and you will see the HTML code behind the site. Once you learn HTML, you’ll be able to copy elements of websites that you like to make your site more attractive.

And, if you need to learn how to build a website, just search for it with Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. You will find hundreds of good tutorials for everything from simple HTML to complex database-driven scripted websites.

Don’t forget modem users!  Many folks still use modems, so make sure your site loads quickly, even with a modem.

If you include pictures, don’t scale multi-megabyte photos using your HTML editor’s scaling command. Your visitor’s browsers still have to download the multi-megabyte image before their browser can scale the image.

Scale the image using the Gimp before inserting it into your website. Reduce the size of your images down to about 30K or so. For zooming, create a separate page with a larger photo and link to it from the original page.

So, get off your duff and build that simple site. Your business will not soar the next day, but people will be able to find you when searching the internet. We’re all needles in a haystack, so put a bright red ball on the head of your needle and get on the web today.

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