3cPlatform

Death of the 5-Page Website

Are you considering building a website for your small business? Before you dive in and create one, it’s important that you make sure what you create today can grow and change as your business does.

Look at the business and not the number of pages

Jennifer Shaheen of Entrepreneur magazine nailed it on the head when she said - When you decide to build a website avoid this statement: "I want a basic five-page website to get me started.” Most companies today don’t charge by the page, all of the companies that have been around longer than a year or two and don’t work out of their neighbor’s kids bedroom, have learned that a website is about the business and the products or services they offer, and its job is to deliver the information the audience (the customer or prospective customer) wants. It sounds pretty straight forward but you would be shocked at how many people want to start with a “cool look” or something “flashy” rather than the real purpose behind the website.

The process will cause you to learn about your own business

If you are entrepreneurial, or it is your first website you will probably learn something about your own business and the areas in your marketing and sales process that need to improve as you start organizing your content for your website. That is why it highly recommended to do so on your favorite word processor before you start building the actual site. It will serve a couple different purposes, first you won’t get distracted by navigation, graphics, etc., and focus on just the content. Doing it in your favorite word processor will let you refine it, and reorganize it pretty easily. Next, print out the pages and lay them out on the floor in front of you or put them up on the wall and take off your owner’s hat and put on your “customers” hat and make sure it all makes sense and that you can get to the information quickly and easily – a good rule to follow to determine “easily” is less than three clicks.

Your should be able to change your content

It is a fair bet that you will no sooner finish your website than you will probably see things you want to change or need to change, because of inventory changes, seasonal changes or special offers you want to make. If you aren’t able to make the changes yourself you may soon start feel that you are being nickel’d, and dime’d to death as a charge for 30 minutes here or an hour there starts to roll in on a regular basis.

Your content needs to be consistent with how you want to found

If your marketing plan doesn’t include search engines you should probably consider firing your marketing person, especially if it is yourself. Search engines play a HUGE role today and it is only going to become more important as time goes on. Search engines “read” content and based on what is on your site they index your site so it can be found by others searching for product or information like yours. For their search engines to be worth anything they have to bring back the most relevant content on the internet based on what the person types in a search field. For your site to be found you must have content and it must be relevant to what is in the search field, and preferably current. There is a lot to making your site get the most from search engines, but one word of caution steer away from any company that refer to themselves as SEO or SEM specialist, especially if they say they can get you to a position or a place like #1. Most if not all of these companies are the scourge of the universe, snake oil salesmen, who have crawled from beneath a rock somewhere, were forced to bathe, shave and put on a clean shirt before they got in front of you, and will shortly have to crawl back where they came from.

You don't know, what you don't know

You need a website that gives you a way to add pages, edit content and upload files. And because you have these needs, the best solution is using some type of content management system.

Invest in Function, Not Pages

Every business out there needs the ability to control their content. You need the ability to change the text on all the pages, the ability to add photographs to your pages and embed code from outside sources like today's social media tools without the risk of wrecking the primary navigation of your site and the overall “look and feel”.

A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words

Working with a program like Photoshop before you try and upload an image to your site can help you better understand how picture size and image size relate. The full program is a little expensive but Adobe has produced an “Elements” edition that is under $100 (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/). Most content management software will resize photos for you, but to ensure that your website's photos load quickly, it is better to resize before uploading. A little training will increase your success in managing the visual aspects of your website and it can help you maintain a look that is difficult to achieve through an automated process.