I co-founded Social Sonar to provide an easy and inexpensive way for my fellow business owners to manage their online reputation and promote their business using blogs, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, and more. You can still reach me at paperfoxes@gmail.com or give us a call at 866-843-4490.

Hope to hear from you soon!

• Home – your snazzy index page.
• About – explanation of your company, philosophy, history, or service.
• Contact – email, address, phone and fax number.

If you have Login/Logout, My Account, Help or Frequently Asked Questions links, those links should be on all pages on the site, as well.

Placement of Standard Links

You can have a lot of fun with the color and style of your website navigation, as long as certain links live in certain areas of the website.

The company logo and Home link should always be on the top, normally in the left corner. When browser windows are viewed on small devices or crowded with “Favorites” bars, the top, left corner is always visible. Your logo should be, too.

Contact, Login/Logout, My Account, and Help links should be in the upper right corner, the far right of your horizontal navigation bar, or the bottom of your vertical navigation bar.

Remember: The easier your site is to use, the more people will use it!

Navigation Best Practices

It is a good idea to keep the navigation the same on every page of the website. People will get familiar with your navigation and travel around your site easily.

Note: The only exception to the “same navigation” rule is the checkout page. You probably do not want all the links for your online store across the top of the checkout pages when people are filling out shipping and payment information. Clicking on links could take people out of the checkout process and lose previously-entered information. Be sure to have Help and FAQ available, though.

Visitors should be able to get to any page on your website with a maximum of three clicks. This is also good for web crawlers, the programs that comb websites for relevant information. If a page is four links deep, Google assumes the information must not be important, and will not search those pages for keywords. You will have a lower search engine ranking if all your information is not cataloged as high as it could be.

If you have a lot of navigation links, consider grouping them in obvious categories and nesting them underneath each other in drop-down menus.

Unfortunately, most photography and art portfolio websites are built using Flash so they look more like a video than a website. I discourage this use of Flash for the following reasons:

• People who want to view a Flash-based photography site have to have a Flash player already installed, or they need to install or update their Flash player before they can view your website.
• Flash websites take a long time to download, so viewers spend a lot of time waiting.
• People can’t send a link to a specific page on a flash site. If Mom wants to share pictures of Junior with Grandpa, she sends him the link to the photographer’s site, and he has to sit through the whole presentation.
• People can’t copy and paste information from your Flash site. A bride-to-be can’t share pricing or pictures from your wedding photography website with her fiance by pasting them into an email.
• In the code for a Flash site, there is almost no text. Search engines like Google display websites according to how relevant the site is for the user’s search terms. If there aren’t any words that match the user’s search, search engines don’t think the site is useful for that person.

For more information about using Flash alternatives for your portfolio website, check out the Featured Website. I used Javascript in a photography website to give all the functionality of Flash with none of the nasty side effects.

Allow people to move through your site at their own speed and share it as they wish. Use Flash sparingly for small videos.

Make sure you can edit your own site.

Even though your time is valuable, you probably don’t pay yourself hourly. You will, however, pay a designer hourly to make changes and updates to your website. Be sure you are only contacting them for large projects and additional design work, not changing your weekend hours or prices. Integrating with blog software like WordPress or Movable Type or a Content Management Solution (CMS) is a great way to maintain your site.

Choose an all-in-one solution.

Recently I have seen website solutions like GoodBarry that offer storefront software, hosting, and email marketing in bundles starting at $40 a month. Not only will this save you from paying multiple bills, which undoubtedly end up costing more once they are added together, but you can have all your tracking in one place. You can see if someone opened an email from you and then visited your store and made a purchase. This saves so much time and money. It also makes it incredibly easy to see if email marketing efforts are paying off.

Use royalty-free images.

These are images free to the public to use. You won’t get in trouble for using royalty-free images without the photographer’s permission. Not all the free images are great, however. You can often find great images for only $1 – $3 on websites like istockphoto. Your designer can suggest images, and you can decide if you would like to purchase them.

Choose a low-maintenance style.

There are certain looks people really like that end up being really expensive. For example, maybe you really want rounded corners on all the photos on your website, or you want all your images to look like drawings. Each image has to be edited to look like this. In the long run, these things could end up costing you lots of money.

Find a designer you can trust.

1. Talk to other small business owners and trusted friends to see how they found their designer. Do they have recommendations?
2. Do your homework. Ask a designer for references, or contact the companies in the designer’s portfolio and ask some variations on the following questions.
   • Did the web designer respond quickly to questions and requests?
   • Did the web designer listen to your needs?
   • Did the web designer explain the decisions he or she made?
   • Did the web designer take the time to make sure you understand each aspect of the process?
   • Do you feel the total cost of the website was a good value for what you received?
   • If you are being charged an hourly rate, do you feel you are being charged fairly?
3. Search for your designer’s name or company name online to see what organizations he or she belongs to, and what projects he or she has completed in the past. If the designer does not have a resume on their website, you can often find him or her on LinkedIn.

Keep in mind that designers no longer need to work in your city. Oftentimes you can find a great designer who is able to offer a good price because he or she works from home, sometimes across the country. If you prefer to chat face to face, consider investing in a small camera that hooks up to your computer. With a $30/year Skype account, you can have video chats where you look someone in the eye 1,000 miles away.

The good news is, if you don’t have an online store, your website setup should be relatively cheap and painless. If you do have a store, it won’t be as cheap, but it should still be pretty easy.

Let’s walk through the Typical Website Design Process. There are just 6 simple steps to designing and implementing a website.

1. Purchase your domain name.
   Your domain name is just the url of your website. For example, my domain name is paperfoxes.com. You don’t need to buy the .org or .net versions of your domain name unless you want a monopoly on the name, or you worry people are going to steal your brand or impersonate you. However, domain names are usually only $10 a year, so it might be a good idea to buy as many variations on your name as you can. I like to search for coupon codes so I can get them as cheaply as possible.
2. Decide on structure.
   Some of my clients like to blog about their business on their website, which I highly recommend as a boost to natural search. Even if you are not planning on blogging yet, you can still build the website using blog software. This will enable you to make edits to the text and images on your website as easily as editing a Word document. If you need an online store, there are quite a few different storefront software solutions that aren’t too expensive. Whatever your needs, you can find the right fit. You should be comfortable with whatever technology you choose.
3. Talk about the design.
   You and your designer need to determine the best look and structure for your site. Write down your vision of the site, your typical customer, and how you would like people to feel when they visit the site. What do other websites look like for similar businesses? What features do people like to see and use on each page? Keep in mind that color plays a very important part in the emotions people experience when interacting with websites. If you have a physical store, you should match the look and feel of your retail store so people know it is the same business. Send your designer links to website designs you like, as well as your ideas about the different features and links you need on each page, and pictures you want to use.
4. Give your opinion.
   Your designer will create a preliminary design image so you can see what the website will look like when it is finally done. Often times the site design will be different than you imagined. Your designer had a reason for every decision he or she made. If you want to know why something looks the way it does, just ask. Let your designer know what things you would like to be different in this stage. Once the code is written, changing the design gets much more complicated – and much more expensive.
5. Witness design in action.
   Once you have decided on the final design, the designer will get to work styling the website in html and css and integrating the design with your software. After the design is finished, you will need to host your website. Designers often offer hosting for their clients so they are the first one to be notified in the rare case that something goes wrong with the server.
6. Learn.
   After the website is hosted, your designer should do a brief tutorial so you know how to edit your website. You should know where the website’s style is hiding so you know where to change it in the future. Most designers are available for additional design work for an hourly rate. Be sure to get all the original stock images and passwords from the designer for future use. Schedule regular backups of the website to off-site and virtual locations.

See, that wasn’t too bad.

The answer is simple and refreshing: Be useful. Have content people want to read. Not only will you be helping your customers, you will also increase your natural search ranking.

Many people create content with a blog. A blog is a great way to talk to your customers in a more informal tone. They get a better feel for you and your company, and they often find additional, useful information. In talking about your business, you are bound to use keywords that rank you higher in natural search results.

Make lots of friends. The more sites that link to you, the more important search engines think you are. It’s just like people. The more people have heard of you, the more important people think you are. The quality of the websites that link to you, however, is really important. A link from a major website like the BBC is much more important to your ranking than links from one hundred really small websites.

Have a lot of information. The more pages you have on your website, the higher your ranking in natural search.

Avoid Flash with every ounce of strength you have. Flash “breaks” your website for search engines. If you look at the code of a website using Flash, it simply states, “Must have Flash player to view this site”. It doesn’t tell the search engines anything about your website, or why it is relevant to the search.

Do your business a favor and focus on natural search from the beginning. Your money will be well-invested!

Search engines like Google want to return useful information when you search so you will use their services again. Search engines send out “crawlers”, “bots” or “spiders” to look through websites and catalog their content. The search engines keep track of “keywords”, or words commonly used to search for things, on the website. When a person searches for something in a search engine, the search engine displays the results according to how useful they are to the person searching. In other words, how closely the keywords on the website match the words in the search.

As a small business owner, you want to make sure your website is listed as high as possible in natural search rankings. Search engine optimization, or, making it easy for search engines to find and catalog the keywords on your site, is crucial to getting a high ranking in the natural results of a search.

For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you want to have the words “wedding photography” on your site, as well as your location. “Chicago”, for instance. When someone searches for “wedding photography” in the Chicago area, Google can tell what location the search originated from, so it returns results relevant to Chicago. The more times you mention keywords and your location, the more relevant Google thinks your website is for the person searching.

Can’t you just list keywords over and over again on a separate page on your website?

In the early days of search engines, it was simple to trick Google into thinking your site was useful for the searcher. People would do things like put keywords in white on a white background so people couldn’t see them on the website, but crawlers would catalog them. But search engines are smart and adapt quickly. Nowadays, websites are punished for using cheap tricks like the one mentioned. Their ranking is actually lower than it could be if all the content was original and contained the same number of keywords.

Why is natural search important?

Natural search is non-stop, relatively cheap advertising. Your only cost is creating content. Lots of people have paid search programs with services like AdWords. In order to have your ad appear on the right side of the search results, you have to continue putting money into the program. If you don’t pay your AdWords bill, your ad no longer appear on the right side. When you invest money and time in search engine optimization, the investment stays with you. Even if you turn off your paid search program, your ranking in natural search will still be there.

Natural search actually works in tandem with paid search. Google displays ads not only according to how much money the person paid for the ad, but also how relevant the website is to the search. You could pay less and be ranked higher than the next company down if the search engine thinks your website is more useful.

It’s really easy for me to say that everyone needs a website. Afterall, I’m a web designer; it’s in my best interest because someone needs to design all these websites. But a lot of people are starting to realize a website is one of the best investments you can make in your business.

I have run into a lot of small business owners who don’t want a website. They don’t sell anything online, so they don’t think they need one.

Whether your business is a physical store, a service, or an online shopping site, your customers need to be able to find you online.

Websites are not just for selling goods. Your customers are searching for information about your business online. They may just want to know your hours, the services you offer, or directions to your store. They may want to know the products you carry, or even your business philosophy. Maybe they like to shop local, or they really love family-owned businesses. Any reason customers need to find you is reason enough for a website.

The first thing I do when I hear about something cool is search for it online. I like to check out what a place looks like and see what it offers before I wander in, especially if it’s a hard place to get to by public transportation. Most of the time I search for businesses, it’s to find their hours so I don’t spend all that time traveling just to arrive at locked doors. For example, I love going to restaurants. If I can’t find a website for the restaurant, I can’t find their hours, or even a phone number to call to find the hours. I often end up going somewhere else. You need to make it as easy as possible to find out information about your business.

Make it easy for your customers to share your business. People love sharing their newest find with their friends, whether it’s a funny video, an uplifting message, or a neat new store. Sending a link via email or posting a link on a social networking site like Facebook is a really easy way to share your enthusiasm. The way I see it, your goal as a business owner is to grow your business as much as possible. Get as many customers as possible. Get a website. Even a one-paged website will help people find you and spread the word. Excited customers and word of mouth are your best advertising tools.

Even if you don’t put up a website, people will still find your business online. Unfortunately, you can’t always control what they see. Every business is subject to reviews on Yelp and a growing number of other customer review websites. Make sure you control your brand and tell your side of the story. The first opinion a customer hears when he or she searches online for your business should be yours.

Don’t miss out on one of the easiest ways to grow your business. Get started on your website.