Local Marketing Guide

Having a website can be a very important component of your web presence. If you want to do more than just have your business listed in the Internet Yellow Pages and Local Search Engines, you have to have a website.

Building your website can be a quick and dirty task that you complete in under two hours or it can be a very involved job that takes up your constant attention for days or weeks. Most local businesses just need to put in the upfront work to get the website live and then not have to worry about adjusting it except for once a year or so.

Here are the basic steps you will have to go through to get your site up:

• Register a domain name (i.e. localmarketingguide.com). I use Godaddy.com to do this because I’ve been using them for years and it costs only $9.20 (including tax) per year per domain to register
• Design your site – if you can do this yourself, great. If not, most small sites can be designed by a professional for $500 - $2000. When hiring a designer, make sure to see some samples of their work. It will also help them a lot if you can show them some site designs that you like.
• Code the site in HTML. Your designer may be able to do this, or most likely can point you to someone who can.
• Find a hosting company.
• Point the domain name to your server, and push your files live.

In many cases, all this stuff will be too intricate unless you have considerable web development experience, and should be left up to a webmaster or a designer with web development abilities to coordinate everything for you. An alternative is to use a service like JustLaunch where you can design your site using their online design tools. However, I have never seen a site designed using one of these services, so I can't vouch for the quality of design you'll end up with or ease of use.

Let me address the steps outlined above in more detail.

Domain Name
Selecting a domain name can be a stressful process because once you choose one, you’re stuck with it. Here are some tips:

• Chose a domain name that is similar to your business’ name. Obviously, if it mirrors your business’ name, that’s great, but sometimes you can also get away with a fun yet relevant and catchy domain name that is completely different from your business’ name. For example, I have a website that is called “Affordable SEO”, but since affordableseo.com wasn’t available, I chose seoforcheap.com instead and it seems to be both catchy and easy to remember.
• If you haven’t selected a name for your business, consider a name that has important keywords in it and get those same keywords to appear in your domain. If you want your site to get high search engine listings, you’re going to do some search engine optimization, and at least a few sites are going to link to you by posting your website’s name. That means that it will help your rankings if your website title contains your important keywords. Here’s an example: let’s say that you’re a florist and your business is called “Mary’s Floral Arrangements.” If people start linking to you using your website title, then you’ll move up in the rankings for “floral arrangements” but not for “florist”. So instead, Mary may want to call her site, “Mary the Florist.” We’ll get into this more when we discuss search engine optimization.
• Avoid hyphens – people generally don’t like hyphens
• Avoid names that are too long or too difficult to remember

Designing your site
Getting your site designed is not easy. One of the biggest hurdles is that designers tend to not be marketers. They may not know how to make a site search engine friendly or how to get visitors to do what you want them to do on your site. Either you, your webmaster (if you have one) or your designer should understand the basics of search engine optimization and which website elements should stand out.

To make your site search engine friendly, it has to be html based. You can use flash for animation, but it should be used sparingly and make sure that important keywords are present in html. If you don’t know what html is, it’s basically the text on a website that you can highlight with your mouse and copy and paste. This is the text that search engines scan and put into their index. Flash is not readable by search engines, so any text that appears in flash won’t have any impact on your search engine optimization strategy.

Before your site gets designed, you should think about what content you want on your site, how you want it to be broken out and which content is of the highest priority. The homepage is what the most people will see, so you want to give people a general idea of what the site is about on the homepage so that they can decide if it’s what they’re looking for or not. You might have an ‘about us’ page and a ‘contact us’ page, but think about what you want your visitors to do. Do you want them to make a purchase on the site? Do you simply want them to find the information that they’re looking for? A good rule of thumb is to design the site so that you’re setting your visitors up to succeed. If your site is indeed what your visitors are looking for, make it easy for them to navigate to the parts of the site that would be most useful to them and to you as the site owner. If you want them to make a purchase, sign-up for something, or call you to schedule an appointment, make it easy for them to do so. This means that from the homepage, it should be easy to figure out how to take these actions. Maybe that means having a big flashy button on your homepage telling your visitors to “Sign-Up for the Free Trial!”

Keep in mind that your website is made up of pages, with your homepage being the most important of them all. The pages that link from your homepage are the next in importance. Of these primary pages, there might be some that are more important than others. Again, you want the more important pages to be easier to navigate to than the less important ones.

In keeping with the idea that you want to help your visitors succeed, your site should be easy to navigate. This means that it shouldn’t be too cluttered and that it should have a navigation with all of your primary links on it. A good exercise for when you’re thinking about the architecture of your site is to map it out on a sheet of paper – called a sitemap. Depict each page with a square with its name written inside it. The homepage should be at the top, with primary pages below it and secondary pages below the primary pages. It should look like an organizational chart and it will allow you to clearly see what path visitors will have to take to get to each page and also if anything is amiss. Here are a couple of examples of sitemaps. Don’t be intimidated. Yours may need be only 1-5 pages/boxes if it’s a simple site.

Onwards. In addition to your site visitors, you also want your designer to be successful right? Successful, that is, in delivering a design that you’re happy with. Well, to that end, make sure that you’re giving them enough information to do a good job in designing your site. Here are the things you should provide:

• Sitemap including which pages are the most important and what you want visitors to do once they get to your site
• Full copy for the entire site including what text should be linked where
• The look and feel you’re going for – should it look intelligent and sophisticated? Or should it look approachable and soft around the edges?
• A list of sites that you like. Try to find some sites that are similar to yours that you like. This will be very helpful to the designer when it comes to figuring out your tastes.

It’s a good idea to work with your designer on a logo and color palette before the designing of the actual site begins, although some designers may just be so good that you’ll be happy with whatever they send your way. The logo and color palette can have a significant impact on the look and feel of the site, so it’s good to sure these things up early.

Coding
Getting your site coded is actually the easy part. All you have to do is hand it over to a coder that knows what they’re doing. If you don’t know anyone, try scriptlance.com. Here are a few things that I always make sure of when managing an html coding job:

• Make sure that it’s coded in xhtml transitional or strict
• Make sure that it’s cross-browser compatible. Every website is going to look different depending on the browser that’s being used, so if you can, try to check the site using several browsers to make sure there aren’t any elements that are sticking out where they shouldn’t be. I generally just check on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera all on the PC. If you want to do an extensive check, you should do IE 5.5, IE 6.0, Firefox 1.5, Opera 7 and 8 and Safari on a Mac. A good coder will generally do these cross-browser-compatibility checks for you, and may even send you screenshots of how the site looks in each browser. Since the majority of internet users currently use Internet Explorer, you should definitely make sure that it looks okay in that.
• Don’t use the position function. This is a pet peeve of mine, but I often change the size of the fonts on the site that I’m reading, making them bigger so that it’s easier for me to read. Now, if a coder uses the position function in CSS, a site’s layout can get thrown out of wack if a visitor changes the font size leading to an unpleasant experience for the visitor.

Getting your site live
This portion will have to be done by someone with webmastering skills. It’s not difficult, but it can take a little time to learn. As for finding a web host, if you’re hosting only one site and aren’t expecting millions of visitors per month, you should be able to get away with a web host that charges about $5 - $10 per month for shared hosting. I haven’t tried a lot of web hosts, but I currently use Lunarpagesfor hosting and recommend them.

What I stress time and again is that if you’re planning on doing search engine optimization for your site, it needs to be top of mind when building it. Either you, your webmaster, or your designer needs to have a firm understanding of SEO. It’s much easier to build a search engine optimized site when you’re building it from scratch as opposed to retrofitting it later on, not to mention the time that you’ll save in the long run.

(last updated 8-16-06)