Building Your Website

So you've crafted your idea and now you're ready to start building your online store? Great! Here's what you need to know:

Four Areas of Website Design

With site objectives and site functions determined, it’s time to get down designing. This is where we begin to plan what the site will actually look like – the overall design, how content will be arranged and how to navigate through the sections. There are four main areas of design to consider:

Choosing Specific Website Functions

If you've spent any amount of time online, you know that the number of available site features are endless. Some functions, while interesting and fun, may add little benefit to achieving your objective. Consider these important site functions for your Website.

Establishing Your Website Objectives

A website without objectives is like going on a trip without a destination. How will you know when you've arrived? In the words of the Cheshire Cat: “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Designing Your Website

Regardless of if you are going to hire a designer, use free WordPress software or learn professional software like Adobe Dreamweaver to create your site, there are a number of things to consider before you break ground on construction of your new site.

Web Site Layout and Design

The layout of a Web page is usually what people think of when they think of Web design. If the layout is poor or doesn't work well, then customers won't like the site.

10 Simple Design Tips

READ MORE - Building Your Website

Four Main Areas of Website Design

With site objectives and site functions determined, it’s time to get down designing. This is where we begin to plan what the site will actually look like – the overall design, how content will be arranged and how to navigate through the sections.

There are four main areas of design to consider:

* Number of Sections / Pages

Even if you aren't designing the actual site yourself, take an hour or two and sit down with a pad of paper and think through the organization of your site. Think about the information you want included on your site, and how it can be best organized so visitors can find it. Create sections that logically group similar information.

Some examples of site sections might be: Products (with grouping of types of products), Contact Us (About us, map, phone/email, newsletter signup, profiles of key staff), Support (FAQ's, Forum, Downloads), Blogs, Media (video, photo galleries), and Your Account (shopping cart, previous order history).

* Site Navigation

Great content poorly arranged is of little value. Some visitors may patiently sift and sort, but most will abandon your site for another that is easier to use. A consistent navigation tool bar is key if you want your information and products to be found and subsequently purchased.

Typically, the logo on the top of each page is a link to the home page. This way, visitors can escape what might feel like a dead end, by getting back to your home page. Ideally, your site will have a consistently placed navigation toolbar, allowing visitors to quickly move from one section to another, without feeling like they've fallen into a deep well.

Does the layout, and more specifically the navigation bar allow for easy browsing? If not, visitors may get frustrated and leave.

* Colors and graphics

These play a significant role in the overall feel and success of your site. Both colors and graphics can communicate more than what you say on your site. Graphics enable you to promote products, show your products in use and build trust.

In choosing colors and the overall appearance, you need to consider your type of business. If you are a professional firm it’s important that your site project seriousness, staying away from bright and loud colors combined with the playful fonts of a kid’s toy store.

Your existing brand should also be considered. If you are expanding your existing business to an online business, it’s critical that the same feel and appearance be projected online. Clients will be confused, and may even think that the website belongs to another company, if you don’t carry the same feel and appearance as your physical store. By carrying the trust you’ve built in person, to the Web, you’ll convert in-store clients into your first online customers.

Questions to consider: Will the design instill trust in visitors, and encourage purchases? And is the website consistent in appearance with my other marketing materials?

* Site functions

Elements such as social networks, blogs, forums and online demos help create a website that will be visited, referred and returned to.

Before beginning to design your site, it’s valuable to spend some time online, to review some of your favorite sites, but also sites in your industry, including competitors, suppliers and trade associations. Once you have a feel for what works well, and what you dislike in these sites, you’ll be better prepared to create your own.

Required Basics in Site Design:

Quick loading pages: patience is uncommon online so you better load it or lose’em.

Ease of Navigation: a sensible and consistent tool bar is a crucial piece of your website. A “home” link should also be on each page. Visitors hate getting lost in a website.

Working links and images: Not only does it take away from your message, broken links and poor images reduce your credibility, and you’ll lose both visitors and sales.

Means of contact: either a form or an email link. Depending on the type of business, a map to your physical location, mailing address and your phone number should be clearly posted.

Site map: help visitors navigate your site so they can find what they are looking for. By providing a good site map, you’ll keep more visitors on your site for longer, and generate more transactions.

READ MORE - Four Main Areas of Website Design

Choosing Specific Website Functions

Once site objectives and revenue sources are determined, you can add functions that will directly contribute to your objectives. If you've spent any amount of time online, you know that the number of available site features are endless. Some functions, while interesting and fun, may add little benefit to achieving your objective. Some functions could both confuse new visitors and consume significant resources (both in terms of creation and maintenance).

Avoid elements that don`t add to your sites success (profitability), regardless of how popular or cutting-edge they seem.

Here are the primary categories of website features.

Important Site Features to Consider:

User Forum: where members can help members, share ideas and receive support directly from your company. While requiring an investment of time to moderate the forum, this can be an effective way to engage clients, and to generate significant site traffic.

Social Network Tools: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace – effectively using these tools can reach thousands of new prospects and help existing clients stay in touch with your company.

Blog(s): an effective and sometimes time consuming, way of finding new clients and interacting with current ones. A well written blog is a great way to build site traffic and share your industry knowledge and insight.

Product Catalog: a necessity if you carry significant numbers of products. Without a properly built catalog, your prospects will abandon your site and move on to an easier to navigate site. The catalog should be searchable, both by key terms and by product category. Sometimes clients know what they want, and other times they want to see what you offer. A dynamic catalog offers the best user experience.

Newsletter Signup: similar to the blog function, is a great way to build client loyalty, but takes significant time to create great content and execute campaigns. Blog content can be used in your email newsletter. Consider aWeber or Constant Contact for your newsletter. Both offer tools to generate signup boxes for your website and great tracking tools.

Media Gallery: (photo, video, testimonials) display your products in use, show product benefits, or actual users comments on how they used/liked specific products. Consider photo gallery with multiple images of your product taken from different angles – will help your visitors get a feel for the product. Host your images and video on your site directly, or with a media host (like Flickr or YouTube).

Online Demos and “How-Tos”: Depending on your type of product, this can either be useful for after-the-sale service reducing calls to your support line, or can help make more sales by showing how the product is used.

Advertisements: either through affiliate programs or directly placed ads, appropriate advertisements can add value to your site, and introduce your clients to complementary service providers.

Member Registration: give your clients a sense of belonging. Either for purchases or simply to participate in the forums, registering members is a great way to build a community.

About Us: We humans are a curious sort. Tell your visitors about you – not just your name, but a photo of the principal’s (or the front end people) and a brief profile. Begin developing a relationship with visitors on their first visit.

Search Box: will reduce the time needed to find what they’re looking for. Google offers a free site search option, or your programmer can create one for you.

Free Content: in the form of downloadable pdf files, these reports are a valuable means to educate your prospects, aiding them in making a buying decision. Often called white papers, this content puts the power in your prospects hands. By educating them, you help them to make an educated decision. Its important to note that these reports should be written in a non-biased way. If it reads like sales copy, it will be thrown away (or deleted) and they'll move on. But if it's written with the purpose to educate then your prospects will benefit, and they'll view your company as the expert – confident enough to give away valuable information – and they'll reward you with purchases.

These site functions are great, but there is a note of caution. Be sure to consider your site design, as you choose which ones to use. It's important that each function will contribute to your specific site objectives. Often it's best to begin basically and add function slowly, seeing which ones work and which ones simply consume time and money.

The next challenge is to take these functions and craft them into an attractive and productive website design.

READ MORE - Choosing Specific Website Functions

Establishing Your Website Objectives

A website without objectives is like going on a trip without a destination. How will you know when you've arrived? In the words of the Cheshire Cat: “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

So let's establish your site objectives. Site objectives are the "why" of website creation.

• Why will this site exist? What niche is being filled? If you aren't filling a niche, your site will have to be very powerful (and likely much less expensive) to compete with the existing players. Niche marketing is the best way to enter a crowded market.
• Why will people visit? And return? Just offering something people want is not compelling. Just stop and think about it – most sites offer products that people want. Why should they visit (and buy from) your website?
• How will you measure the success of this website? Incremental goals are best. Using weekly, monthly and quarterly sales targets allow you to gauge growth and see what's working – both in terms of layout and marketing.
  

These questions require compelling answers if you are going to have a successful business. The internet isn't the same as opening a corner store – where people will purchase just because they are walking by. Online buyers have an infinite number of options and require a compelling reason to visit and purchase from your site.

The next component of site objectives is revenue generation. Consider four ways to create revenue.

How Will This Site Create Revenue?

Direct Revenue: Obviously the most common way is to sell something. There are many variations of this, including hard goods (that physically ship to the consumer), electronic goods (that are downloaded or emailed) or services that don't ship, but are performed. The essence is the same for all these: direct online sales. You are responsible for processing orders and payments, along with customer service questions and concerns.

Indirect Revenue: Some sites focus on directing prospects to a physical location, but don't actually process transactions directly online. This is of decreasing popularity as a primary use of a website, but is still important component for every business with both a physical and online presence. This type of revenue can be difficult to track, unless a specific tracking component is included in your marketing campaign.

Affiliate Marketing: Significant revenue can be created by promoting other peoples product and services.

Cost Savings: Some sites can create significant savings to a company's bottom line by making use of online technical support, downloadable user manuals and comprehensive FAQ section. This offers quick service to your clients and can save significant costs to your back-end support. This is an important component on every site.

Most successful online businesses combine a mix of some, or all, of these revenue sources.

The next step is to determine which site functions can be used to reach these objectives.

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Designing Your Website

Regardless of if you are going to hire a designer, use free WordPress software or learn professional software like Adobe Dreamweaver to create your site, there are a number of things to consider before you break ground on construction of your new site.

Effective site design includes many factors and these can be broken into three categories:

1. Site Objectives (why)
2. Site Functions (what)
3. Site Design (how)
   

So first we need to establish why the site will exist. Then what tools will be required in order to meet the objectives and finally, how can we tie these pieces together into an attractive design and functional Website.

Establishing Your Website Objectives: A website without objectives is like going on a trip without a destination. How will you know when you've arrived? In the words of the Cheshire Cat: “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Choosing Specific Website Functions: If you've spent any amount of time online, you know that the number of available site features are endless. Some functions, while interesting and fun, may add little benefit to achieving your objective.

Four Main Areas of Website Design: With site objectives and site functions determined, it’s time to get down designing. This is where we begin to plan what the site will actually look like – the overall design, how content will be arranged and how to navigate through the sections.

Website Hosting

After all the effort of designing and building your site, you'll need to choose a web host.

Planning your Online Business

Its one thing to design and create your website; it's quite another to create a successful online business. How to Start an Online Business

READ MORE - Designing Your Website

10 Simple Design Tips

1. Organize your site from the beginning.

If you organize the folders, for your site, before you begin creating your pages, then you will always be able to find your pages when you need them.

1. Create folders for different types of files. If you are adding pictures to your site, you should have a folder named something like "graphics" or "pictures. This is where you will always place your pictures. If you have some pages about you and others about your kids, create different folders to keep each in.
2. Name your pages and graphics in a way in which it will be easy to find them later. When you have groups of pages or graphics that are similar, give them similar names. For instance, if you have a group of pages with stories about your son, start the name of each file with "son". The file names could be: sonpark, sonschool.
   

2. Keep your graphics sizes small.

When the pixel size of your graphics are too big, it takes too long for your page to load. Your readers may not stick around long enough to see you graphics if they are made to wait.

3. Put large graphics on a separate page.

Create a page especially for your large graphic. Link to it from your page and label the link with something telling your readers that it will take a long time to download. They will wait to see it if they are warned ahead of time.

Use of a thumbnail is an option in place of a text link to your graphic page. A thumbnail is a smaller version of your graphic. You can create one with most graphic programs by just making the graphic smaller or using the "thumbnail" option, if the program has one.

4. Update your site regularly.

When people come to your site, they are looking for information about you, or whatever your site is about. If they like your site, they will come back again. When they come back, they will be looking for more information. If you don't have something new for them to look at, they may not come back again. Give them what they want and add more information regularly.

5. Keep text narrow.

It is easier to read text that is kept in narrow columns. Did you ever wonder why newspapers keep their columns so narrow? It's to make it easier to read. It's even more important on the Internet because your readers are reading on their computer screen. If they can't read everything, without scrolling sideways, then they probably won't read it at all.

6. Test your page with different browsers and browser settings.

Your pages may look different to different computers depending on the browser they are using and the settings they have set. Finding out how your pages look to others will help you create better pages.

• Change the font size in your browser. Not everyone uses the default settings in their browser. Go into your browser's settings and change the font size to see how other's may view your pages.
• Check other browsers. There are online tools to help you view your site with other browsers without having to download the actual browser. Sometimes your site will look great to you, but to someone with another browser, your site looks awful. Test your site and make some changes, if necessary.
  

7. If using a non-default font, also use alternatives.

If you are using a font, for your Web page, that is not a common font, you should specify a common font for your readers who don't have that font on their computer. You can do this by using this font code:

<font face="font1, font2, font3">
** Replace font1, font2 and font3 with the names of the fonts you want to use.

8. Make your <title> description descriptive.

Search engines key on these words so they should have words that are in your page. If your site is about sewing your title could be something like, "Sewing With Thread To Make Blankets Shirts Clothes Dolls". Don't use punctuation except a dash, if necessary.

9. Close all tags.

When using HTML you must close all tags that you open. Your pages may not look right in some browsers if you don't.

• Examples:

<html> closes with </html>

<body> closes with </body>

<p> closes with </p>

<font> closes with</font>

<b> closes with</b>

<li> closes with </li>

<ol> closes with </or>

<ul> closes with </ur>

• There are some exceptions to the rule. Some tags don't need an ending tag because they only perform one function. Here are a few of those:

<br> - Creates a blank line.

<hr> - Creates a line across the page.

<img> - Starts a link to a graphic or other image.

• Keep them in order. When you open one tag and then open another inside it, close the last one first and the first one last. Let's say you open <html>, and then open <body>, and then open <font>. To close these tags, you must close <font> first with the </font> tag, then close the <body> tag with </body>, and finally close <html> with </html>. If you close <html> before you close <body> your page may not look right.

10. Don't use too much white space.

If you put too much white space on your page it will just look bad. Some is necessary because you don't want your page to look crowded, but too much will look, spacey.

READ MORE - 10 Simple Design Tips