Making Your First Website Work for You

An article to give you some helpful pointers when creating your company’s first website. It should help you make something that will accurately reflect your business and help your online presence.

Making Your First Website Work for You
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Joshua_Danton_Boyd]Joshua Danton Boyd

It’s common knowledge to every business owner that not having a website is a big disadvantage. It’s a great way to attract customers, sell your products and to give out plenty of info. The thing is though, it can be a pretty daunting task if it’s your first one. Here’s a couple of tips to get you started.

First off, if you don’t know how to design a website or use any up-to-date programs for building a website, then you have two choices. Hire someone else to do it or spend some time teaching yourself. You really don’t want to end up with some website that looks like it was pulled directly from the mind of Salvador Dali with warped images, fonts changing in size for no reason and colours that could set off an epileptic fit. There’s plenty of resources online to learn from, but if you haven’t got an artistic flair, it’ll be better in the long run to find someone else who does.

If you haven’t heard of search engine optimization, or SEO, then you need to find out as soon as possible. You can hire people to do this for you, but for a start up site it might not be worth the cash when you can do the basics yourself. There are loads of great guides online to read through to get started, but here’s a couple of tips. Pick about 3-5 keywords related to your business (i.e. if you’re a hardware shop words like ‘hardware’ or ‘DIY’). Have them on every page of your site (twice on the homepage and once on every other) as this will help search engines connect these words to your site. Also, get a blog on there too. You’ll need to have fresh content on your site regularly and a blog is a simple way to get this done.

One thing often overlooked is the chance to sell the story of your business on your site. It is a difficult thing to pull off in-store, but people are increasingly interested in exactly where their products are coming from. Ben and Jerry’s do this to great effect with a whole section of their site called ‘Our Story’. It makes people more comfortable with a company. Ben and Jerry’s is massive, yet knowing their story still gives them a local feel and people are more trusting of this. Do not be afraid to make you and your history the face of your business. Websites are a perfect chance to get people interested in your company on a personal level.

The main point is not to let your website become just another part of your business that has to be done. Try not to see it as a chore and see it as a way for you to represent your business in exactly the way you want. When you get it right, it won’t be long before you’ll see the benefits.

Joshua Danton Boyd is a copywriter for the online accounting firm Crunch and regular contributor to Freelance Advisor. http://www.crunch.co.uk

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Making-Your-First-Website-Work-for-You&id=7401503] Making Your First Website Work for You