Small Business Design Resources

How to Start a Website

I get many questions from small business owners asking about website basics. So much of what is written seems to be written by those, and for those, who already know what they are doing when it comes to having a business website. So let’s take a step back and review a few basics, because I know from talking to small business owners that there are many of you who will appreciate this information.

The two must have things to having a website live on the Internet for everyone to see are a domain name and a hosting account. Let me explain what those are and pointers on few other things that are needed to get your website online:

1. Domain Names
   A domain name is what you call your website. It is also referred to as an address or a URL. This is what the user will type in the browser to find your business. You must use a unique domain name that no-one else is using. The Internet is built using many large computers, called servers that know how to talk to each other using special addresses, called an Internet Protocol addresses or IP addresses. When you create a name like MyBusiness.com you need to register the domain name so that:
   • No-one else can use it
   • The internet servers will know how to find it by assigning an IP address to it

There are many organizations that will register the domain name for you, but we use and recommend startlogic.com.

2. Domain Name Extensions

By convention, a .com address is a commercial business and is the most widely used in the world. Other conventions used in the U.S. are .edu for educational facility, such as a university, .org for an organization such as not-for-profit organizations, and .gov used by government websites. After .com, .net and .org are the most memorable extensions. Different countries use different conventions, generally used to indicate their country. For example check out www.google.ca (Canada’s Google), www.google.com.mx for Mexico’s Google, and www.google.co.uk for the United Kingdom’s Google.

3. Hosting a Website

Some organizations only give you the name – they don’t give you a space for your website. Lets compare this to a P.O. Box. When you just get a domain name it’s like getting a P.O. Box address, you can’t actually move your stuff in there. The whole purpose to have a business website is to attract visitors to your products/services, for this hosting is required. Some companies will both register your domain name and host your website. However, domain and hosting providers can be different for one site. Again we use and recommend startlogic.com for your website hosting needs.

4. Building a website

Registering a domain name and signing up with a hosting provider does not necessarily mean you have a website live online. What you have is a space for your website to live online. Let’s take an example of a physical retail store. To have an actual brick and mortar retail store, you need to lease a space, so once you sign your lease you can move in your products and organize your store. Same goes for a website, domain name is your address, hosting is your space and now you need to build a website for your customers to view your products/services. There are two ways to build your business website. You can learn how to build your own or have a professional web designer do it for you. Building your own is the most cost effective way to put up a website but it means you have to spend time to learn something about building and maintaining it, that means taking you away from your business duties. Having a professional web designer create your website will assure you that your website is built right, user friendly and free you to work on your business.

5. Working with Design Leap

Choosing Design Leap to build your business website means you have a one-on-one relationship with a professional designer to guide you and answer all your questions while developing a business website that is targeting your ideal customers. This is the way to go if you’re looking to save time and money in the long run.

Ins and Outs of Website Policies

In this post Jor Law, Esq. from www.homeierlaw.com examines the legal requirements when designing a website.

Exciting news…your brand-new website design looks great and it’s ready to go live. You’ve even got that fancy copyright statement on the bottom like all the other websites do. But wait. Many other sites have disclaimers, terms of use, and/or privacy policies. Do you need to have them? Should you have them? Why or why not?

Generally speaking, there is no legal requirement in California to have any disclaimers or site policies on a website. That shouldn’t be confused with other laws which may require protection of confidential collection collected. For example, if a doctor must keep certain client information he or she collects confidential, the fact that such information is collected through a website without a privacy policy does not mean that the doctor no longer has the obligation to keep that information confidential.’

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for having website policies. Terms of use policies can contain important disclaimers and other provisions that help govern the use of your website. What a terms of use policy contains could vary drastically depending on what information is on your website and what website functions are offered. For example, if your website has social networking elements or content contributed by users, you may want to include a disclaimer providing that each person is responsible for the content that they contribute and that you do not review, endorse, or necessarily approve of their content. You may want to reserve the right to remove content that is offensive. If you are providing your own content, you may want to let your users know that, while they have a license to view your content, they may not reproduce it, distribute it, or otherwise use the content in any other way without your prior written consent. Generally speaking, from a legal point of view, a well-drafted terms of use policy serves to benefit you as it generally sets forth conditions of use, various disclaimers, and other language protecting you as the website operator or owner.

A privacy policy, on the other hand, tends to exist for the benefit of the visitors to the website. Without a formal privacy policy, you would be held accountable to the privacy laws anyway. A formal privacy policy typically sets forth items such as how you will collect information, what information you will collect, and how you will or will not use the information you collect. If your privacy policy sets forth certain standards outlining how you will handle information collected on your website, then the expectation is that you will be held to those standards. Obviously, the standards set forth in a privacy policy must be as stringent as those required by law. What that means is that if you have privacy policies that are more stringent than would otherwise be required by law, you have held yourself accountable to that higher level of conduct. Despite this, many websites have privacy policies because the perception is that visitors to a website feel more comfortable divulging their information if there is there is a clear privacy policy.

It is highly advisable that you consult an experienced corporate technology attorney if you seek advice regarding what sort of policies may be appropriate for your website. For those on a budget, an online search will turn up a plethora of terms of use and privacy policies. However, be careful when copying another website’s policies. Aside from possible copyright infringement, the policy that you copy may be tailored to a specific jurisdiction or the unique requirements of that website.

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Jor Law, Esq. is a business and corporate attorney and a founding shareholder of Homeier & Law, P.C. He can be reached at (818) 450-1550 x552 or through www.homeierlaw.com Copyright © 2009. All Rights Reserved. May not be duplicated, reprinted, or distributed in any form without permission by the author.

How do I change my domain DNS record?

Specific steps on how to change your domain DNS record varies from one provider to another, but basically all you have to do is ask your hosting provider for their DNS which will look something like this:

Primary Nameserver: ns1.hostingcompany.com

Secondary Nameserver: ns2.hostingcompany.com

Then you will need to go to your domain registrar (the place where you purchased your domain) and look for DNS change or something similar to this in the control panel. Some companies won’t let you do it through your control panel, so you would have to contact them and give them the new DNS names.

It’s important to remember that the actual update might take anywhere from 24-48 hours to change.

Quick Tip: Domain and Hosting providers can be different for one site

Once you’ve registered a domain name for example with Godaddy.com, you’re not obligated to purchase their hosting services for your website.

You are free to choose another hosting provider for your website and all you would need to do is change the DNS (Domain Name System) settings on your domain name to direct to your hosting provider. Find out more about DNS.

Let a Professional Design your Business Logo

It’s a fact that as a small business owner you wear many hats, especially when you’re first starting out. So on top of everything else that you do for your small business, you’ve decided to create your own logo. It’s clear that you understand that your small business needs an identity so people everywhere begin to recognize your name and want to do business with you. But do you really want to jeopardize your business reputation and begin the logo design process on your own? Unless you’re a professional graphic designer you have no expertise in the logo design, nor have any clue where to start, so why would you bother.

Trying to do logo design on your own
I understand you might be thinking that to hire a graphic designer is expensive and your small business budge can’t afford that. It really isn’t expensive if you think the value that a professional can bring to your business image in the long run. Let’s say for example you’re an excellent hair stylist, you have your own salon but you don’t have a logo that separates your salon from all the other salons in your area. You decide to sit down one night and take a stab in creating your own logo. You have an idea in mind so you open up your Microsoft Word and you start trying all the available fonts and clip art that come with that program. The result, a generic look with outdated clip art. The problem here is that you’re good at what you do but you clearly can’t specialize in everything. You don’t even have professional programs that a graphic designer would use to create your logo design. Imagine if I tried to cut my own hair, I would look like a mess.

Working together with your graphic designer
As a small business owner you’re always full of ideas and know your business better than anyone else. Here are a few pointers in how to work together with your graphic designer to help create your ideal image:

• explain what you’re envisioning
• provide a list of colors you like and also the colors that you absolutely would not want to see used
• let her know if you would like to have an icon, just a logo type or both
• where will your logo be used? Only on paper and web or may be also on clothes tags or anywhere else
• provide examples of other company logos that you were attracted to
• provide a list of few of your competitors
• always give us much information about your business as possible, including your target audience and geographic location that you’re targeting or anything else that might help to understand your business better

Remember, you want your business to be successful so don’t ruin your image by doing your own logo design.

How To Determine Your Target Market

Figuring out how to market your small business website effectively is critical to the success of your business, especially if you are investing time and money in advertising. For example, you don’t want to target high-end luxury goods to low income people or low-end goods to people looking to buy the very best.

Understanding how your customers’ think and what their spending habits are, is one of the keys of successful marketing. This is true whether your business is a mom and pop store on the corner of town or a small business website with great potential for global appeal.

There are some basic questions you can ask yourself when directing a marketing campaign – or even when choosing what products to emphasize on your website. Who needs the product? Is it a niche product or one with global appeal? Are you trying to reach a specific age group, if so consider who else you might need to market to. For example, if you are marketing video games to children under the age of 18, your advertising needs to appeal to youth but also to parents. If you are marketing luxury goods to men who are likely to be married, you might also need to target their wives and so on.

Once you have identified your target audience you need to think how you are going to reach your audience from your small business website. What blogs might your audience be reading? What sites might they be going to where it is worth your while to spend money on advertising? If you are not sure, go to some sites and look for ads for similar products to yours. If you notice that several other websites with similar products are favoring particular methods of advertising – perhaps they’re on to something.

Don’t be afraid of exploring new technology. Viral videos are all the rage, mostly because they work. Explore places like YouTube, and Twitter, and look into using Yahoo and Google ads to see how you can improve traffic to your website. Don’t just create your own log-ins to these sites, but leave messages on other people’s sites – preferably sites that might be attracting the same kind of traffic as would like to see coming to your site – and don’t forget to leave your calling card – a link back to your website.

Because owners of small business websites are usually on a tight budget, don’t overextend the finances to invest in heavy advertising until you know it’s working. Once you know you are reaching the right audience, you will know when it’s time for a more committed investment. Remember to monitor your advertising sites and when you get traffic to your site, make yourself aware of where it’s coming from. There are many tools on the market that will help you analyze traffic and many of them come free. Ultimately who is coming to your site will drive your ongoing marketing strategy. You want to know who is buying and what they are buying. Statistics are vital for increasing performance. You need to know what is going on in order to leverage it or improve it.

And don’t give up, remember that with persistence comes learning and the more you learn the easier it becomes. If you are a new small business website owner, expect a learning curve and exercise patience until you start to see traffic, and do good research to find out what’s going on with your website.

Keys to Search Engine Optimization:

You have built your website and published it to the web; you sit back and wait patiently but your site doesn’t show up in any major search engine. You might start to wonder; why won’t my website show up in a Google search? If you just sit and wait for your website to show up in a search engine such as Google, you might be waiting for weeks. If this is happening to you it’s time to review your search engine optimization strategy. Here are a few key pointers to ensure you are doing all the right things.

Getting your site to the top of the search engines is both an art and a science. Websites use crawlers and “bots” (short for robot) to crawl all the sites on the web. Using a complicated series of proprietary algorithms they assign rankings to web sites based on your site’s keywords. The phrase Search Engine Optimization refers to the art of building a site that ranks high in the search engines. To check your google ranking you can go to http://www.prchecker.info. Your site must be published before it will be ranked and it may take a few weeks after you publish the site before you have a ranking. That’s because it takes some time fort the search engines to find you. There are millions of websites on the internet.

The rank is based on a keyword or key phrase and how relevant that key word or phrase is to your site. So you may rank high in one key word and low in every other. The more narrowly you focus on a single key word or phrase throughout your site, the more likely you are to improve your ranking for that key word or phrase. The objective is to have your entry show up on the first results page for your chosen keyword or key phrase. You don’t need to understand exactly how search engine optimization works in order to get your site to the top, but you do need a few insights. Here are some tips that will help you improve your ranking:

1. Know what key phrases are being searched on
There is no point in building keyword density on words that no-one is searching for. Even if you get to the top of the rankings on that keyword, if no-one is typing it in, they won’t ever find you! A reverse search engine tool will help you optimize on what people enter in the search engines to look for your product. For example, “women’s clothing” is a popular search phrase, whereas very few people search for “blouse with white polka dots” even though it is a valid piece of women’s clothing. So you must find out what people are searching for.

Here are a few Google tools to help you out:
Search-based keyword tool
Google Insights for Search

2. Be relevant
This is perhaps one of the most important concepts to search engine optimization. Your keywords must be relevant to your website. And you must use them throughout your site, including in your web page titles, in your meta-tags, in your article titles and even, if you can, in your domain name itself. If your website sells pet products, and your keyword is “pet” you will be relevant, but if your website sells women’s clothing, and your key word is “polka dots” that won’t be so relevant because it is very narrow, so choice of keywords is very important. Now, if your website only sold items of clothing with polka dots, then polka dots becomes a very significant keyword. Again, you would want to make sure that there is a market for polka dots, by examining the reverse search engine results.

3. Use linking
When the search engines do their crawling, one way they “discover” sites is by following links from other sites. When you first publish your site, even if you have done a good job with search engine optimization, it can take several weeks for your site to show up in the search engines – sometimes three weeks or more. You can reduce this time by using a good linking strategy. Let’s say a web site with a high rank links to your site, then your site will be discovered more quickly than if there are no links pointing to it. It is important to link and be linked by sites that are relevant to your keywords. Linking to lower ranked sites that are relevant to your own is okay too, even though it may not help you as fast, but linking to sites that are not relevant to yours can impact your ranking.

So that’s the science of Search Engine Optimization, now the art comes with practice. There are many tools on the market that allow you to analyze the traffic to your website, analyze keyword density and even analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s site. One of my favorite tools is http://www.websitegrader.com website. So if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google at your first attempt, don’t give up.

Who Needs a Website These Days?

Your business is small, you’re just starting out and you don’t have any employees. You may be asking yourself if you really need a website. After all, not all businesses are destined for internet selling. The fact is, today, more and more businesses both large and small realize that having an internet presence, even if you don’t directly sell through the internet, is vital to doing business in today’s market place. Ever since the early 80s when the internet first took hold, the importance of the medium has been steadily growing. Today if your business doesn’t have a website it’s not taken seriously, it’s the first place most people turn when they are looking for information about a company be it their address and phone number, their price list, opening hours or inventory.

Staying Ahead of the Competition.

In an article dated July 9, 2007, AdvanceMe Inc, a leading provider of funding for small and mid-sized businesses, reported on the findings of the Capital Access Network Small Business Barometer:

http://www.capitalaccessnetwork.com/documents/SurveyResultQ22007.pdf .

AdvanceMe distilled the results and made the following statement about small business owners:

“The results reveal an understanding of the importance of promoting their business presence on the Web with 68 percent utilizing first generation search engine optimization tools to help drive traffic, and another 58 percent using some form of online advertising.”

http://www.advanceme.com/press/2007/press_release070907.aspx

Having an internet presence sets you up as a first class provider and lets your customers have access to your store to answer simple questions even when your brick and mortar store is not open for business.

What are these small business owners doing with their websites?

If you have a business that is not built around internet selling, like many of the business owners in the survey, you may be wondering what these small business owners are doing on their websites. Here are some of the things they are accomplishing:

• Setting themselves apart from the competition

• Providing information about hours of operation and inventory to their customers

• Providing email access via their “contact us” page so customers can ask them questions

• Providing an opportunity for partners and affiliates to sell their products

• Advertising promotions, sales and new products or services

• Reaching customers who do not live in their local area

• Letting customers see pictures of their products

• Blogging – providing information on a weekly basis – staying in touch with customers

Reach More People, Offer a Better Service

People turn to the internet more and more frequently. A decade or two ago, people looking for a local business would turn to the yellow pages of their local telephone directory. Today, more and more people turn first to the internet and do a search on businesses in their town. Let’s say you have a dry cleaning service which really cannot be done over the internet. You may think having a website is a waste of time. But if your competition has a website, and their name comes up in the search engine, they are likely to get more business than you from travelers, new residents, and people who simply want to change dry cleaners.

Coin Laundry image from Flickr

If you have a website you can not only reach your dry cleaning customers, you could develop an email service to let people know when their dry cleaning is in, let them know about special offers. You could use the website to advertise extra services such as alterations, tailoring or shoe repair.

No matter what your business, with a little imagination, you will be able to think up several ways that you can improve or enhance your service with an internet presence even if all your customers are local. You could even use the website to increase income by using advertising for similar products on your site.

Adding Images to Your Website

Pictures and images make a web page pop and add color and visual interest to your web page. They illustrate your products so that customers can see what they are buying, they attract and entice people to stay on your website and they provide helpful clues if you are describing a “how to” process.

Finding good graphics for your site can be time consuming and costly. It is not as simple as searching on Google Images and downloading whatever you find. Most pictures, images and in fact any content that is visible on the internet, is protected either explicitly or implicitly by copyright. We do not recommend downloading pictures that you find on the internet unless you have either paid for them or the site explicitly tells you that they are available for public use. Just because you don’t actually see a copyright notice on a web page or image does not mean that anyone can use it. There is a wealth of information available about copyright laws, but for the best information, go straight to the source at www.copyright.gov

There are some good websites that publish photos and pictures expressly for public use. Some of these require payment. The cost of graphics can vary widely from completely free to hundreds of dollars. Purchase price depends on size but you can find great photos for just a dollar or so. Try www.istock.com for some great pictures at reasonable prices.

Here are some handy links to free image sites (but be sure to check their rules also), or you can go to www.everystockphoto.com which searches multiple free sites for you.

Free sites for images:

www.sxc.hu
www.morguefile.com
http://flickr.com/creativecommons
www.stockvault.net
www.photogen.com
www.freedigitalphotos.net
http://public-domain-photos.com
www.freerangestock.com

Taking your own pictures:

While it is convenient to use pictures that already exist there is no reason why you shouldn’t also incorporate your own. The most obvious reason you would do this is if you want to include a photo of yourself or your team on your web site. With today’s digital cameras taking great shots is not as hard as it used to be. Here are a few tips for taking great pictures

• If you’re going to use the photo you take only for web purposes, make sure you set your camera to the lowest megapixel resolution (no less than 1MP). This will prevent you from uploadling large files that can slow down the loading of your website.
• Keep the background simple with no clutter and a single color that contrasts well with your foreground image.
• For faces, don’t get too close and experiment with taking shots from different angles, not just straight on.
• Don’t zoom. Using the zoom can produce a fuzzy picture unless you are using a high quality camera.