NEWS
11 FebruaryPlanning a website, Pt. 2
How can a website help your business or vice-versa?A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about "pure play" web sites: businesses that were solely based on the internet. When the bubble popped, it became clear that there were actually few of these businesses. Most businesses operate both online and offline. Assuming you already have an offline business, it's useful to consider how a website would reinforce that business. Something useful to consider would be how your existing business could provide uses for your website? For example, your business is supplying baked goods, a website could be the equivalent of an order form or a brochure. Hopefully, you'll print the web address on your business cards and people interested in your products could consult your website to get more information. Over time your website will be linked to from other sites, this could lead to getting some initial contacts through it.
The trick of getting and setting up a website is to come up with one that will work in both directions. The website should compliment your business and enable the online side to do what the offline side of the business does. To a certain degree, though it would be nice to log onto a website and a dozen fresh doughnuts pop out!
What are your competitors doing?
Undoubtedly every other business in the same industry as you will be competing against your website with theirs, trying desperately to get more eyeballs on their site. What do you do better online than you competitor, you'll have to offer something better in order get their attention? Take some time to think of the keywords and / or phrases that potential visitors might use in a search engine, such as Google, to find your business online. Don't be afraid to ask existing customers / clients / friends and family to think of some keywords or phrases. Type those keywords into a search engine and see what results come up. Like it or not, those are the websites that yours will be competing with. Spend some time on these sites and see what you can learn from them. That doesn't necessarily mean copying their ideas, which would be obvious to the search engine visitors, you need to find out what they're offering that you don't and vice versa. Can you satisfy those visitors in a better way? Your competitor searches could be restricted by your specific geographical area, depending on the scope of your business.
It's useful to distinguish between all the relevant results. A thorough way to do so would be to draw up a table with the competitor's website in each column and each page type in a row. Put a tick mark in the table when a competitor has a specific type of page. Create the table column by column and row by row, this will help you to read the results of pages each of your competitors has. It will also help you to determine which pages are "industry standard" and should be included in your own website. Trying to be too different just confuses visitors. Do not mistake this for being boring, by all means add something different, but the core should be standard - unless all your competitors are making life unnecessarily difficult for their visitors.
Are your suppliers / supporters online?
Making note of which of your suppliers or supporters have a web presence can be rather handy. It makes sense for you and them to be networking, by means of maybe linking to each other's websites, as most business people know this is one of the best ways to constantly get fresh feet through the the doors.
How large should your website be?
Most sites start small and steadily grow, rather like most offline businesses. The initial questions are how small should the site start and how large should it grow? Here are some pros and cons of a range of potential website sizes:
One Page:It will always be possible that the site size you have will get larger, if you don't allow for growth and your website does grow, at some stage you will have to do a costly redesign and most of the your users bookmarks will stop working. It would be in your best interest to think a little bigger.
The smallest website consists of one page. If all you want to do is state your web presence and redirect people to physically come through the shop doors than all you really need is a one pager. This would apply to a business that wouldn't need explaining, like a dentist, and the only reason for having a website would be to give your clients another way of finding you. This would be like a permanent advertisement (as long as you have the one page site) but customers would only find it by searching for it. Therefor the most important factor for a one-page website is that is must be found. Common business types exist everywhere, your customers will most likely be from your local area, so you should make sure to be included on any relevant website index or search engine. Any and all information on your one-page website must constantly be kept up to date, don't become one of the many websites that have old, incorrect information.
Small sites:
A small business websites typically would consist of around 10 pages. There would be a home page, an about us page, contact details / enquiry form page and then a page or 2 for products or services the business offers. In the past it was rather easy to simply say these 'small' websites were 1) not updated often; 2) designed for customers who've heard of the business. This is no longer really the 'norm'. Most businesses are well aware of the positive impact of a web presence and have read or heard that adding content on a regular basis or having good, quality content will help with web searches. So, it's better to have a regularly updated website because you'll attract customers who might not have heard of you but searched for your services. This could mean adding new services or products on a regular basis or simply adding relevant news or information related to your service or product. This will also instill confidence in people who have heard of your business and found relevant, good information on your website.
Medium sites:
The medium sized business website would consist of about 100 pages. It's at this size that a site starts become less predictable (and possibly more interesting) than the 10-page small business site. It's large enough to give visitors some incentive to come back and take another look, granted the site has good information. This does make it a little more difficult for visitors to find specific pages and you might need to consider having a site map or internal search engine so your customers can find information easily.
Large sites:
A large website would consist of 1000-odd pages. You can imagine finding the right page among 1000-odd to be quite difficult for the visitor now. A site of this size is beyond the capability of a single person to maintain - unless most pages are very small and in the same format. Sites of this size (and upwards) usually generate pages from a database, using a content management system (CMS) to coordinate the work of various contributors of the site. There's usually one editor or webmaster and a number of part-time contributors. Out of date material is usually a serious problem because no-one sees it as their job to remove such material, unless each section of the site is the responsibility of a specific person.
Gigantic:
Websites of this size (in excess of 100,000 pages) are extreme. If a visitor of large website has trouble finding information, you can imagine the visitor to a gigantic website will find it near impossible. So, they need top quality information architecture, comprehensive site maps, site-based search engines and plenty of cross-links between related parts of the site. If you don't have a website, you may not reach this stage for a very long time - but if you think that it could become a possibility, it would be easier if you planned for this from the start. This size of website has the same problem as large sites with out-of-date content. There is a need for multiple contributors who assume responsibility for specific sections of the site.
View Planning a website, Pt. 1