You can’t wait to add a bunch of bells, whistles and even a few sirens to your new site. Every new gizmo and high tech option, from streaming music to high resolution graphics, will find a place there. People are going to be amazed with your incredible website design. You have to wonder why so many other businesses are creating such boring sites, though. Don’t they like the thought of using these cool options?

While those other businesses may just adore video content that plays the second the site starts loading or huge flash pages, they are smart enough to put those things where they belong  on their personal pages. Why? Imagine sitting in an office cubical and quickly looking up the drycleaner’s website to get the phone number so you can call to make sure your suit is ready to be picked up during your lunch hour, which starts in five minutes. The big boss is strolling by, but you aren’t worried because your monitor is facing away from the corridor. Suddenly, your computer starts screaming out the lyrics to “Splish, Splash.” So, how frequently are you going to visit that drycleaner’s site in the future?

Simpler sites load more quickly and are less likely to cause customer embarrassment, which is why most businesses tend to avoid all the bells and whistles that seem so exciting.

You’ve decided to make your own website. You don’t need a shopping cart or fancy animated graphics. A simple, professional site that looks great and tells people all about your business is all you require. However, you do have quite a bit of information to get across, so you plan to use the professional hosting package. If setting up the site is anything like other things you’ve ordered, it should be fairly simple, so you’re just going to jump right in.

Before you get very far, you may want to take a moment to think about exactly what you want to cover. While it is true that setting up your site is easy, you still need to have an idea of what you want where when you are putting together a big site with a lot of content, or you will end up with an unorganized jumble of pages.

 

• Create a content web on a piece of paper first. You home page is in the center and the main category pages are the spokes that come directly from it. From here, each spoke may have several spokes for more detailed content coming from them or they may not need any additional pages of content.
• Once you know your basic categories and your subcategories, you can begin building your site. When you follow your written web, your site will be well organized and easy for web surfers to navigate.

 

You have one mission this year  learning how to make a website. You lugged home books large enough to qualify as furniture from the library and talked to the computer whiz next door (who is also your paperboy.) Everything you see and hear is downright terrifying. Apparently, you will have to learn new languages to create your site and you know how well you did in Spanish class in high school.

If you just had a bigger budget, you’d pay someone, like your paperboy, to make the site, but when you hinted around, he mentioned what his Uncle Ed paid him to design a site and you can’t afford that much. So, it is back to those huge books and words like html and ftp. As you stare helplessly at the first page of the first book, you think that if there was an eaasier way that you could make it so easy for you to design your own business cards, there’d be some way to make a website without all this hassle.

Actually, you can take those books back to the library and forget all about all those scary abbreviations. In fact, if you’ve ordered business cards, you’ll be able to see your business name and some personalized welcome text on the design you select as soon as you hit the button to choose that design. Putting your site together will take minutes and is no scarier than making your own business cards was. Mission accomplished.

You’ve got some absolutely amazing business cards. Believe it or not, these cards match the colors you’ve chosen for your brick and mortar business. In fact, you like the cards so much that you’re going to order stationary, your postcards and your promotional fridge magnets. Then, you see there’s an option for custom web design through the site, too. Since you are a detail oriented person who believes that a brown belt can only go with brown shoes, you are all for having everything match, from the business cards to the website. However, you have to wonder if you are going too far. Is using the same design for everything okay? Absolutely!

When you develop the same look for all of your business promotional materials, your site and even your checks, you are creating something that is known in the business world as a brand. A well developed brand is a great thing to have, because customers associate you with certain characteristics and develop trust and loyalty when they see these things over and over again. They will subconsciously begin to look for your colors, fonts and logo when they are looking for a service or product that your company provides.

You like color. No, you love color. Your home has orange walls, brick red walls and even a few lemon yellow walls. Your business has purple and hot pink walls. People love all that color and you’ve decided to bring your vibrant palette to the online world. Your business website is not going to be like all those blue, gray and muted green websites everyone else has. You can’t wait for the customer compliments to begin.

You barely have the site up and running when the first call comes in. Unfortunately, instead of heaping praise, the customer tells you the site is hard to read. A second customer strolls in the door and tells you that while he loves the store, the colors on the site are so bright he actually developed a migraine. Wait a second. You used the same exact color shades on the site. What is going on here? There are several reasons your customers could be objecting to your bright hues:

 

• Different browsers interpret the same color differently. A nice pale yellow site may appear garishly yellow on one browser and greenish on another.
• Monitors are hard on our eyes when we read black text on a white background. Throwing hard to read colors into the mix increases eye strain.
• People simply have different tastes. What appeals to you may be unattractive to someone else. Since the customer is always right, it is better to have a business site with neutral colors.