Who NEEDS a website?

Posted on August 7, 2010 by admin

Who NEEDS a website is only part of the question because almost everybody could use a website but more importantly you need to know what the goal of your website is.

There are basically five purposes for websites. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Branding
  • Sales
  • News/Information
  • Fun

Advertising and Branding work almost the same way but with advertising you are trying to direct the visitor to a sale or a product or service. This can be your own product or service or it can be someone else’s product or service where you receive a commission. This is commonly known in the Internet Marketing community as affiliate marketing.

Branding is just getting your name out there for people to know. You can do this to promote yourself, a business, a product or just about anything you can think of.

Sales is pretty much self-explanatory, you are trying to sell a product, again this can be yours or an affiliate product.

New/Information again is self-explanatory you have information that people need that you can provide from one central source. This can be as varied as letting your family know what you are doing to promoting concerts at your venue. This can also be tied to the advertising, branding and sales. By providing quality information you can entice visitors to come back more often and subtly direct them to your products or services or your affiliates products and services.

Fun is simply where you have something that you enjoy and you create a website because you enjoy the topic and talking about it. These types of sites range from joke of the day to nematodes that promote healthy growth in grape vines and everything in between.

Now let’s talk about the number one reason people put up a website, this isn’t the purpose of the website but it is the end goal, MONEY!

All the types of websites listed above are capable of making money. How much they can make depends on what you are offering and how well the website is built and promoted.
Right about now you might be wondering what type of website can make you the most money, advertising, branding, sales, news/information or fun?

Actually the best websites include all the various types of purposes with one main purpose.
The most profitable are the ones that have their own product or service to sell as their main purpose and use fun, news/information, branding and advertising to keep people interested in their site and coming back for more.

In future articles we will discuss topics that you need to know to maximize the profits from your website, what to look for in a web design and if requests are received we will tell you what you should look for in a specific niche.

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Small Business – Build a Website Solve Your Problems!

Posted on October 5, 2011 by admin

At least if it is done right is can solve a lot of your problems. A lot of small businesses have the idea that if they build a website it will increase their income, client base, reputation, sex appeal and many, many other items that are promised to them by web designers that just learned how to code a page.

Yes, it is true a website can increase a small businesses income, client base, reputation and even sex appeal in some case, if it is done correctly.

If you are running a small business and want to build a website there are only a few reasons to need one:

  1. To sell a product or service.
  2. To find new clients or customers.
  3. To promote your business or event.
  4. To brand your name or business.

For item number 1 “To sell a product” we will make an assumption that you are already a small business and you are already selling your product and the true purpose of the web site is to sell more of the product which in effect makes this the same reason as number 2 “To find new clients or customers”.

If you think about it, all the reasons listed above boil down the basically the same thing, making more money.

So all your problems are solved, just build a website put it on the internet and instantly new customers and clients will be beating down your door and your small business will boom into a fortune 500 business in no time, at least this is the concept presented by quite a few web design companies. But the truth is that simply building a website and putting it on the internet isn’t going to help you at all.

That might sound like an odd comment for a web designer to make, but if you simply build a website and put it online it is the equivalent of a person in England pouring a bucket of water in the Atlantic Ocean and expecting some one in New York to notice.

The reason for this is that there are millions, possibly billions, of websites (definitely billions of web pages) on the internet and if your site isn’t designed the correct way there is no way for a new customer or client to find your site. By designed the correct way we aren’t referring to the appearance of your site, we are referring to making your site search engine friendly.

A beautiful site not listed in the search engines is as useful as a race car without an engine. If you manage to find the place it is stored it is nice to look at but doesn’t fulfill its purpose.

This means that your site has to be listed in the search engines preferably on the first page of the search engine responses for whatever product or service you are providing.
The techniques used to make your site search engine friendly are called search engine optimization or SEO for short. There is on site optimization and offsite optimization for this article we will only be briefly covering on site optimization and what you should look for from your web designer.

  1. Key words – Keywords are the words or phrases your potential clients will use to find your site in the search engines. One of the first things your web designer should discuss with you is the proper keywords for your business. A good web designer will take the basic keywords you provide and do a little research and give you a list of keywords that will give you the optimum results for your business in the search engines. This should include the number of times a keyword is searched per month and how targeted it is to your business.
  2. Title tags – Title tags are basically the name of your web page. Your designer should be able to use the appropriate keywords as title tags on the appropriate pages to help your search engine ranking.
  3. Meta Tags – Meta tags are hidden code only seen by the search engine spiders that should be implemented on every page of your website.
  4. Text Formatting – certain text formatting can help you with your search engine rankings the main formats are bold, italic and H1 (headline size 1).
  5. Alt Tags – alt tags are used to label images on your website. They are actually intended to be used by programs that read web pages for the visually impaired. Your images should have alt tags that accurately describe the image and when possible you should include your keywords in these descriptions. With most browsers you can see the alt tags by holding the mouse over the image.
  6. Linking – linking is how your potential customers will navigate the site. It is also how the search engines will find all the pages of your site. For your visitors this must be easy to use and self-explanatory. For the search engines it must be comprehensive and ideally work with keyword loaded anchor text.

These are the basics that your web designer MUST take into consideration when designing your site. If these aren’t covered the odds of a new client finding your site are very slim.
A couple of things to watch for:

  1. Flash – flash is a program that can create visually stunning sites and add a ton of functionality to your site but it isn’t search engine friendly. When a web page is created entirely in flash there is no text for the search engines to read this makes it very hard for your site to rank highly in the search engines. If your designer talks to you about a flash web site make sure they have a plan to also get the content from the flash in text form for the search engines.
  2. Images – images, just like flash, don’t provide test for the search engines. Make sure your designer uses the alt tags on images and ideally provides a caption and/or description for the image in the text content. A lot of web designers are graphic artists that don’t fully comprehend the technical aspects of getting a site listed in the search engines and will use almost all images and very little text on the sites. This can make a visually stunning site but leaves very little for the search engines to work with.

Even if you don’t understand all these points you should discuss them with your web designer BEFORE you hire them to create a site for you. A web designer that truly knows the business will be able to explain all of this to you. Some one that has just learned to put up a WordPress or Joomla (content management systems for websites) site probably doesn’t understand the true need for search engine optimization and won’t be able to explain this to you. Yes, they might be able to give you a beautiful site but just being a beautiful site, the site isn’t fulfilling its purpose providing you with new customers or clients. Ideally your site will be beautiful and rank in the search engines but if you have to choose pick functionality over beauty because that is the purpose of a web site for a small business.

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5 Things to Consider When Designing a Virgin Island Web Site

Posted on August 12, 2010 by admin

Here is a list of 5 things to consider when thinking of having a web site designed in the Virgin Islands.

  1. This one isn’t really just for Virgin Island web design, it should be taken in to consideration by everybody that is thinking about getting a web site built or rebuilt.  Unless, you understand the technology of the internet and computers you should hire a local web designer.The main reason for this isn’t so you can stand over their shoulder and watch them work (that will drive most web designers crazy) but there are times when it is very handy to be able to meet with the designer.

    One instance that happened to me, when I needed some pictures to develop a web site for a company overseas and they knew how to send me pictures via email but every time they sent them they would send thumbnails (very small pictures usually used as a preview to the full size picture) which were too small for me to fit into the design without the picture becoming grainy when I enlarged it.  Their problem was they didn’t have digital images, only normal photographs that needed to be scanned into the computer and no one in the office that knew how to scan them properly.

    If this had been a local company I could have dropped by picked up the photographs scanned them in the proper resolution and format for the internet and returned the photos the same day.  As it was this took almost 10 days to get resolved.  As you can see it can cost you and the web designer a lot of time for a simple task.

  2. The next two items both have to do with getting people to your website from the search engines.Search engine tip number one be prepared for questions on keywords.  Just in case you don’t know what keywords are, they are the words that people type into Google to look for something.  If you know the keywords that someone would use to find your product and you build the site around those keywords you will constantly be getting new customers/visitors through the search engines.

    This might seem to be a simple thing but a good web designer will be able to help you with this and to check and see if searches are actually being done for those keywords.  You would be surprised how many people build websites around keywords that are perfect for their product but are never searched for in the search engines.  You need keywords that are searched for and describe what you have to offer.

    When you figure out your keywords in the Virgin Islands you must take in to consideration  whether or not  you are a business that only operates on only one island, such as a hotel, you need to make sure your keywords aren’t just Virgin Islands and possibly not even just your island and Virgin Islands.

    Let me explain that, people are getting smarter with their searches on the search engines.  This means that they are using more words when they perform a search. Now instead of just typing Virgin Islands in to the search engine form the type things like “St. Thomas Virgin Islands Hotel”. If your keywords don’t contain St. Thomas. Virgin Islands and Hotel you most likely won’t turn up for that search.  This is also the reason you might want to include keywords for other islands.

    Let’s say you run an Inn on St. Croix.  The person that was running the search for “St. Thomas Virgin Islands Hotel” probably isn’t looking for a hotel on St. Croix but it could be just because they only heard the name St. Thomas for the Virgin Islands or that a friend stayed on St. Thomas and told them about it.  This does mean that they are less likely to click on the link about St. Croix and come to your site but there is a chance that you will sway someone from St. Thomas.  The reason you want to do this is because “St. Thomas Virgin Islands Hotel” gets searched three times more often than “St. Croix Virgin Islands Hotel” which means more people have the chance to see your link. As a matter of fact “St. Thomas Virgin Islands Hotel” gets searched 50% more often than “Virgin Islands Hotel” and you want your link to turn up where it will be seen.

  3. Search engine tip number two is don’t concentrate too much on the island without also covering the Virgin Island, VI and USVI.  The reason for this is because if you don’t include Virgin Islands, VI or USVI the odds of you ranking high in the search engines is lowered considerably.  For example if you just use St. John you will be competing with St. John England, St. John’s University, St. John New Zealand, St. John Newfoundland and numerous others.As you saw from above people are more likely to search “St. Thomas Virgin Islands Hotel” than just “Virgin Islands Hotel” so you need both the island name and the Virgin Islands in your keywords.
  4. Working with a local web designer has its advantages when it comes to review. It is much easier for you to point out things you want changed on a computer screen than through an email or on the phone.  Yes, there are a lot of things you can say in email and over the phone, like I want the logo on the right side instead of the left side but I have had emails that have said, “the little swirly thing on the third picture (no page listed) should be moved more to the center”.This was on a website that had over 40 pages and over 100 images on it.  When I called them to try to figure it out they couldn’t remember which page it was on and only that it was a picture with a person in it (over 50 of the pictures had people) and a swirly thing they couldn’t describe any more than, “it was swirly, yellowish and toward the bottom.”  I asked them to go through the website page by page and let me know what page it was on.  It took them almost two hours of going through the website to find it.  When they did find and called me to let me know what page it was on the swirly yellow thing turned out to be a jump rope that couldn’t be moved in the image so we changed the image.

    If this person could have sat down with me and my laptop before the site was put online they would have saved themselves a couple of hours of frustration.  It is also a good policy for any one purchasing web design to see the design before the site goes online.  All web designers would prefer to have all the changes emailed to them so they can build a reference list (myself included) but there are times when being able to look at something the same time as the client can save both parties aggravation.

  5. Talented Virgin Island web designers understand the uniqueness of the Virgin Islands.  They know the problems you will face with technology in the VI.  Local web designers know that you should host your site on servers located outside of the Virgin Islands (hurricanes and broken underwater cables have proven this). They understand the unique features that your business or service can offer your potential customers that people from off Island don’t really get.For example locals know that your hotel is a half a mile from that great restaurant or within walking distance of the beach.  Were as a non local won’t know that unless you tell them and believe me no matter how hard you try there is always another little nugget that will make your business or service look better in the eyes of the visitor and the odds of finding that nugget increase with the number of people you have thinking about it.
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