Just because you are a small business with an even smaller
website design budget, does not mean that you cannot have a
professional looking website and presence on the web. All it
means is you will have to do some of the work yourself instead
of paying some design firm to do it for you. Amazingly enough,
self designed pages from small business owners who did their
research frequently end up being better and more focused than
professionally designed pages. Consider the following
suggestions when designing your own website.
Suggestion #1 - URL
First of all, your URL is very important and since it is the
address to your website and what everyone will use to find your
place on the web you need to put some careful consideration and
thought into it. You don’t want to come up with a URL that
already exists as a .com and register it as a .tv. If you do
this, you will just lose customers to the com. Likewise, you
don’t want to register a URL that has nothing to do with your
website or content either. Be thoughtful and register a URL that
pertains to your services or products, is as short as possible,
and is spelled easily.
Suggestion #2 - Host
The next thing you must do is find a web host. Since you are on
a shoestring budget you will be tempted to save money and go
with a free host. Do not do this. Do anything you have to do to
convince yourself that free is not always better because in this
case it is not. Frequently the free sites don’t get indexed by
the search engines, they don’t provide much space or bandwidth,
and since they are free you can’t do too much about it when the
site is down or you went over your visitor limit. Instead, find
an affordable host and there are many for under $10 per month,
offer decent bandwidth, storage space, e-mail services, as well
as other tools you need.
Suggestion #3 - Professional Templates
When it comes to designing your site, many hosts have tutorials
and wizards that will help you do so. However, you will want
your site to be as professional as possible so keep this in mind
when choosing colors and the like. Also, use professional
templates that you can buy or download for free online. They
will give you the professional appearance you want for free.
Suggestion #4 - Text
When it comes to loading text on your website make sure you
break it up into small chunks, use bold words, bullets, numbers,
and anything else that you can think of to make it more
readable. Avoid small fonts, light colors, or strange texts.
Also, remember that the search engines use keywords in your text
to return results, so be sure to include keywords in your text
as well.
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