Tips

Content: Substance & Message

Making notes, an outline, sketches
will help you organize your website ideas.

Content is the most important aspect of a website. Your content is your your message. Content is the text of your website but it is also in the way your website is put together, how it looks and works.

Your website becomes an environment or habitat for your content.

Audience, clients, customers, colleagues...

Think about what your potential audience, clients or customers want to know about you, your products, services or organization. Who are you trying to reach or attract to your site? Keep your audience in mind while you build site content.

Being Found

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) & Listings

Maintenance of a site includes Search Engine Optimization, aka, snazzy acronym: SEO. It is a good idea to have someone check up on your SEO, or learn to do this yourself. There are ways to optimize search but the single most important thing for search is quality content. Never underestimate the importance of good old-fashion substance and networking.

The words you use in the text content are important for search to crawl through and assess. But, if the bots can't access they can't assess. For example, a flashy page where all the words are images or locked inside and unsearchable structure alienates the search engines. It also usually turns humans away. Most of us want a site to load promptly and won't wait for a slow loading site.

Serious grounded brainstorming about your business and audience will get you farther than magic beans that attract a zillion golden hits.

Getting Listed and Swapping Links

Consider organizations or institutions that would recommend, review and/or link to your site. For example, a site that reviews your kind or product or service. The local chamber of commerce, regional or city listings and trade journals are kinds of sites that list other sites. You might consider trading website links links with companies with compatible services.

Costs of Site Building, Hosting and Maintenance

If you are on a tight budget you can save money on design costs if you prepare your content well. If you are really broke see what you can do with free web options.

Thinking in Key Words
is not always easy

While you write your text content consider using words that your audience will be using while searching for your products or services. Remember what you know about your own web surfing experience while you write content.

There is an endless amount of information online to learn from. Getting comfortable finding the information you want changes everything. It helps you consider your audiences surfing experience. Web surfing also helps you understand how important key words are and can help you think about what key words would be most useful to you.

Social Networks & Blogs

Facebook seems to be the one most people are using. It is a good idea to have a FB "Page" for your business. You can make one yourself or hire me to set one up for you. It is a fairly easy and efficient way to connect interactively with your site. If your audience is into twitter, linkedin, second life or other social networks build a presence in those neighborhoods.

If you plan to post a lot a Blog site is an option. I'll blog about blogs when I get the blog going.

Design in General

• What overall look and feel do you want your site to have?
  Do you have a logo or theme?
• Think about what websites you like.
• Think about how high your tolerance is to sites that do not load quickly.
• Remember your audience.

Images, Sound, Music, Movies, Games and other Media

• What photos and graphics will work with the text information?
• What other kinds of media might work well with your content and audience?
• Bells and whistles can cost in cash to build, time to maintain and worst of all- download time.

Structure or Site Architecture: How many pages and what kind of links will it have?

More Tips at the ActualArt.Biz Blog