Website Design for Small Business Owners
A website is the least expensive route for a small business to communicate with its customers. Web pages market the company and its products 24/7 and promotes the company band image. Furthermore, by making product information brochures available for download (eg. as pdf files) you can save £000s in printing costs. However, a website that is obviously out of date with dated, tired material will reflect badly on your business. Having a well designed website with an easy to use content management system encourages regular refreshment and will benefit your company. You can easily have a website designed like this one that you or your staff can update and modify - its as easy as using MS Word.
Please do not waste your company's online opportunity
on cheap standard templates that come bundled with web hosting packages. Your company or organisation deserves a website designed to fit its purpose.
A Fixed Price Website for £500 complete with Content Management System
For Small Business Owners in Berkshire, Thames Valley, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Surrey and Wiltshire.
Website Design and Hosting
- Website Design
- Help with page content
- SEO search engin friendly design
- E-commerce sites for selling your products
- CMS for self-maintenance of site - easy page updates
- Forms for customer registration
Content Management Systems (CMS) Explained
has been the method of choice of for huge corporations to manage their websites. Now, the benefits of CMS are available for small business websites and should be a serious option when you (the client) want to take control of your own websites. This is still the case even where most maintenance is carried out by others as it will reduce the time and effort and therefore the cost of website maintenance. Some of the advantages of using CMS are described below:
- You can take control of your websites content. Non-experts (i.e. your staff with no web design experience) can safely modify and add website pages using a straightforward editor that connects to the CMS. Editing a page will not affect the look, style or content of any other page
- Your site will have a consistent look and style across all pages because it uses standard page templates. More than one template can be used
- The website navigation is managed by the CMS and automatically updates to take account of pages added or removed from the website
- Ease of editing page content will encourage you to keep the website content fresh and up to date. For example News updates are easily added and maintained. Where a Web Agency maintains your website the cost of simple changes should be minimal
- Any template changes update on all relevant pages instantly
Many open source CMS systems are available so the CMS software is free
CMS Made Simple
is a mid range product providing a wealth of sophisticated features, sufficient for most websites yet is simple enough for website owners (you) to use. It will provide more than enough features for the average small business website. Some more powerful systems (e.g. Joomla) have many more advanced features for website designers but contain features not necessary and are overly complex for straightforward sites. The reasons I use CMS Made Simple are:
- It is powerful enough to run most small to medium size sites for personal use, charities, clubs and associations or small to medium companies. (The the University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering site which utilises CMS Made Simple has close to 500 pages)
- The software is easy for the site editor to learn and use (very small learning curve) so self maintenance is possible. I personally encourage this and will train users so that they can manage 90% of their own site updates
- The URLs of all pages are search engine friendly so most pages of your site will get indexed by Google and other search engines
- Low cost shared server web hosting accounts can be used to serve the site
Search Engine Optimisation Explained
You may have heard of the concept of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is the process of optimising a specific website so that it will have a high ranking on search engines (e.g. Google). If your site is highly optimised and has a high ranking for a particular search phrase (like Sage and Excel which this site does particularly well for) it means that when users enter the keywords into their search engine of choice that your site will feature in the top 10 or top 20 sites. This is of course what every website owner aspires to but it is not straightforward.
Type the two words :: Sage excel :: into the search panel in Google. It finds some 3,200,000 pages that it has indexed for these two words. Note that this site features in the top 10 because it has been optimised for that particular phrase. Note also that typing "Sage Excel Thames Valley" restricts the number of returned pages to 10,200 so the competition for a top 10 placement is less. You can use geographical terms in your site content to help local people and businesses find your site
Now type the word :: holiday :: into the search panel, notice that Google finds 320,000,000 pages.
It takes a lot of time and effort to achive a top 10 placing inGoogle for the phrase "holiday".
What you need to do
The degree to which you need to optimise your website depends a lot on your business and the use you want to make of the website. If you are established with existing customers and use your website to provide up to date product information you may not need to worry too much about SEO. At the other extreme if you are selling holidays and the only way that customers will find your business then Search Engine Optimisation to achive a top 10 or top 25 placement is critical for your business.
Please contact me (no obligation whatsoever) to discuss the issues raised on this page (e.g. Website design, or Content Management, or SEO and what they mean for for your business website.