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A sucessful website is a collaboration between you, your business and your website designer. For this to work, there are several things you as a client can do to make the process smooth, rapid and worthwile.
Clarify and record your goals
Before you start, identify the goals of your website and communicate them clearly to your website designer. e.g. if your goal is to make money as opposed to serving as a charitable organisation your approach and design may be different.
Prepare your content first.
Designers often find that clients want a website because websites are perceived to be useful, the client knows they need one, but haven't got a clue how to go about it or what they need to put on it. Don't expect your web site designer to not only design the layout and appearance of your website but to also find the content for you.
Gather together the material you want to include on your website including articles you want to post, photographs, videos etc. All these should be in electronic format unless you are willing to pay extra to your designer to scan or convert them.
Research the competition
Do some research. Have a look at what is on competing websites in your field even if you have you own ideas, broaden your horizons. You are likely to find things you didn't know, things you knew but have forgotten, things explained more clearly than you would have put them.
This exercise will also help you clarify areas of excellence you that you can stress on your website as well as things they have missed out on theirs. You may also find things they do on their site that yoiu can do better e.g. if they have plain graphs on their site perhaps you can have more attractive 3-Dimensional pie charts on yours.
Prepare a list of keywords for your designer
Do you know what words people seeking your product are most likely to type into the search engines. What are the terms mostly used to describe your product are services. Prepare a list of these for your website designer so they can be incorporated in the site. This will help your site to rank more highly in the search engines. Make sure you build these words into any articles are going on your site but make sure you dont use them artificially. Your articles need to be interesting, informative and natural to their readers.
Website Name/Domain Name
Do an experiment. When searching on common search engines for your product or services, how many of the results have the words you typed as part of the domain name. Consider building your product name into your website name. With so much competition for search engine dominance this may make a lot of differerence in your web site success.
Maintain and update your site
Get your facts straight and keep your information up to date. It might be worth getting your designer to build you a Content Management System type website from the onset so that you can update your site at any time once it is built without having to get in touch with your designer. Think constantly about what you can do to improve your site. Stay abreast of the competition. Add a news section or newsfeed.
If you can do most of these things then you are likely to succeed in building a successul small business website.
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