Monday, February 22, 2010

How to run a small business website

Thanks to the automated Content Management Systems, businesses can now publish easily on their websites. However, once they have got their website, most small business owners are totally clueless as to what they should be doing with their website.

Web is so full of content and the web users are people hungry for content all the time. So if you provide them fresh content they would keep visiting your website. The big question here is what you should put on your website as content.

This is a difficult question to answer. Since most business websites do not need to change that often, once you have added the description of your business, your products or services, your work there is basically done.

To keep your website alive you can always add a blog. With blogging you can post news, announcements and other information on your website in an informal way.

You can add information about new packages or offer discounts for special occasions. To inform your visitors about these changes you need to provide them options to subscribe to the content of your website. So add Feedburner email subscription to your webpage and allow visitors to subscribe to your content via their favorite news readers.

Adding a link to your business profile on twitter and facebook will help you interact directly with your existing and potential customers. A visitor on your site can then add you directly and ask you questions online on your profile pages. Such things will also increase you customer loyalty and eventually your sales.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Social Media Ready Web Design - A social visit made easy

Social Media marketing has proved itself as an effective marketing tool, particularly for small businesses with very niche and hard to reach markets. In some cases small businesses have marketed themselves so effectively that they beat their large competitors with better corporate funding and resources. 

However, social media is also making people smarter. Not only the businesses who are out there to exploit social media, but also the consumers who are now well aware of the choices they have. Businesses need to be smarter about how they promote themselves on social media. 

Planning is also an important part of any marketing plan and ignoring a web design in this marketing could lead to an unsuccessful waste of resources. If you are planning your web design now, then it would be better that you think about how you are going to integrate social media into your website. However, if you already have a website then you should re-check your web design to make sure that it is social media ready. 

What is a Social Media ready web design? 

Web design with room for adding social website buttons; a web design that publishes RSS feed and provides links on the web pages for easy sharing, content aggregation, and content submission. Your web design should be interactive and users should be able to follow links to your social profiles on social networks. 

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Small Business Website Design Projects - Considerations

U.S. Economy in general and global economy in particular gets the most contribution from these small businesses. When large corporations were throwing people out of the jobs during recession, these small businesses were finding a new boost. Cheap labor was now readily available and innovative minds were at their disposal. This caused a boom at grass root level which was so not meant to be measured but after a while the US economy has started to feel its benefits. The small businesses understand the significance of marketing and have found ways to apply it using fewer resources and reaching small markets.

A web presence is essential for effective online marketing so small businesses are hiring web designers, developers, freelancers, graphic designers for logo design and many more people associated with the web development industry. This has directly benefited the web design sector of IT industry.

Some business owners even try to do their own website designs. They research on the web how they can do it and spend a lot of time downloading open source CMS, buying shared hosting, registering domain names, uploading their CMS, and then learning to use it. All these tasks are very time consuming if you are new to web design.

But then hiring people or companies to do that needs money and who has money these days? Not the small businesses they don’t have it. But the good news is that the web designers don’t have it either and with little effort small business owners can easily find web designers who would do their websites at unbelievably low prices.