You’ll have to decide whether you want to do the web site design yourself or hire it out to a professional.  I’m surprised at how many times I talk to people that tell me it will be a long time before they can make some changes to their web sites.  Most of the time, it’s because their niece had originally done their site over a spring break weekend and she’s in the middle of finals right now or some other nonsense.  Your web site is very important to your business and should not be created by somebody who will not be immediately available for updates and changes.  Make sure that your web site designer will be there for the long haul!

I recommend at least learning some of the basics about web site design so that you can make minor changes yourself without the assistance of your webmaster.   If you’re looking for a great web site design package I recommend learning Macromedia’s Dream Weaver.  You can read more about this product at http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/

Dream Weaver is the preferred choice of professional web site designers and is far superior to FrontPage or anything else out there right now.  Not only is it the best but It’s also the easiest to learn. Another really great program that just came out recently and is used by both beginners and experts alike is XsitePro. This software program makes it easy for anyone to create a website and even helps you to optimize them for the search engines. I have had sites I built with XsitePro indexed by Google in just a couple of weeks!

Keep Your Images and Pages Small in Size!

Keeping the size of your images and web pages is very important because if it takes too long to load, people will simply leave.  Remember, a lot of people are still surfing at 56k so plan for that.  Examine all your images and make sure that if the photos are all saved as .jpgs (quality level 7 or so) for maximum space savings.  After you’ve sucked the air out of your images, you can use a tool called PrettyHTML to suck the air out of your HTML files.  You can get this program at this web site: http://mpp.at/pretty/

Pretty HTML has a “Compress” option that takes out all the spaces from an HTML file.  I use Dreamweaver a lot and while it’s a great program, I find that when I cut and paste a lot, the file size goes way up because there are lots of spaces in it.  Using PrettyHTML will take all these spaces out and make a nice small file for viewing on the web.  I’ve seen files go from 350K down to about 23K before! Also, and this is crucial make sure your images have “alt text” code. Search engine spiders can’t read pictures and this alt text code helps then read your site, so be sure to use keywords you are after.

Navigation

Good navigation means using easy to understand menus and never putting the user into a dead end page.  Search engines can send a customer to any page of your site so it’s important to make it easy to get back to your home page from any other page on the site.   You should be able to get to any page on your site from any other page on your site.  Having good page linking also helps with getting your site ranked with the search engines because if a search engine hits one of your pages, it will find ALL the pages in your site.

Build a Site Rich in Content!  

The most important thing to remember about first rate web sites is that they are always rich in content.  For example, if your site sells Widgets, then include as much relevant information as possible about widgets on the site.   Make it easy to navigate around your site, tell about all the benefits of your widgets.  Finally, make it extremely easy for somebody to buy your widgets online with a minimum of effort. We will cover how to automate content to your site later in the book.

The home page of your web site is without question the most important page of the web site.   It should contain enough information so that someone can tell immediately what you do.  Make sure that you have at least a brief paragraph or two that explains your products on this crucial page and not just pretty graphics!   Your first page should be a concise introduction about your company and products.  The details can come in the later pages.  

Another way that web site publishers are making money is by using blogs and automated content in addition to manual content to make monetize their sites with advertisers like Google and Yahoo. We will go over this method in detail in the chapter on blogging.

Tell Your Customers How To Reach You!

Make sure that your web site has some type of Contact Us link that lists your company name, email address, mailing address, phone number, and fax number.  People really like to be able to talk to somebody on the phone when they have questions.  If they can’t reach you on the phone, they will move on to a company they can reach!  I also believe in listing your phone number and email address at the bottom of your home page for easy access especially if you have a product that you sell.